One of the most intriguing problems in the study of the Middle Ages is the effort to establish what constituted a characteristic attitude toward sexuality and the organization of the family. I do not need to stress the insufficiency of quantitative sources on this subject. Cultural attitudes, to be understood, must be viewed through rituals, myths, customs, and above all the private lives of ordinary people. What little of this kind of information has filtefed down to us from the Middle Ages has come largely through literary sources. Yet treating literary texts as historical sources poses a delicate problem. We must remember that information transmitted through the written word will severely underrepresent the attitudes of a largely illiterate populace. Moreover, on a subject such as sexual and family relationships, a perfect topic for ideological interpretation, we must be doubly careful not to accept the bias of any one kind of source until we have checked it against as many other kinds of sources as possible. Bearing these cautions in mind, we can, nonetheless, learn a great deal about medieval attitudes toward sexuality and the family by approaching the subject through the rituals and customs governing marriage. This is what I propose to do in this article. Treating certain literary texts as primary sources, and checking them against other kinds of documents, I should like to focus on the matrimonial system of fifteenth-century France. I believe that on the basis of what we know about the rules governing courtship and marriage (as well as what we may learn about, violators of these rules), we may delineate certain patterns at work. In short, we may begin to describe medieval attitudes towards sexuality.

What, then, are the sources of our information on this subject? There are several types of texts outside the domain of imaginative literature. These include:

1. Folklore. I have used as a folkloric document the exciting and ambiguous text, "Les evangiles des quenouilles" (The Gospels of the Distaffs, hereafter EQ, Jannet, 1855) which lists no fewer than 260 popular beliefs, many of them concerning marriage. I also include in this category the judicial texts collected by Roger Vaultier for their folkloric interest. Another rich source of ethnographic information is the inquisitional records of Bishop Jacques Fournier concerning the inhabitants of the village of Montaillou. The testimony of over 500 villagers at the trials of suspetted heretics during the early fourteenth century has been arranged thematically and thus made especially accessible to the cultural historian by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Finally, I have referred to the works of the folklorist Arnold van Gennep who in his Manuel du folklore français contemporain catalogs customs still in use in the twentieth century. The longevity of rituals and traditions which have survived since the fifteenth century in the traditional peasant world underlines their structural value.

2. Works of demographers and of historians.

3. Writings of canonists and of theologians, the official proponents of cultural models.

Medieval literature is an apparently eloquent source on the subject of sexuality and marriage: a long tradition of works on this subject extends from Antiquity throughout the Middle Ages. The problem with this tradition is that it is a satiric, antimatrimonial one which attempts to show the misfortunes inherent in marriage itself. For the most part, these misfortunes are viewed as the fault of women, whose defects constitute relentless motifs repeated from one work to the next: their taste for foolish purchases to satisfy their vanity, their tyrannical impulses, their irrepressible desire for sexual gratification. The attempts to learn from works which seem so far removed from reality and cast in a rhetorical mold seems doomed from the start. Nevertheless, I believe that the historian's situation is not hopeless and that some of these texts can be of use, if read carefully.

For their information on marriage and courtship customs, I have found particularly interesting a prose work of the beginning of the fifteenth century called "Les XV joies du mariage" (The ISJoys of Marriage) and a set of poems from the end of that century inspired by this work. Before proceeding to a consideration of the customs themselves, I should like to say a few words about these two literary sources and the ways in which they may be approached. As may be guessed from its title, The Fifteen Joys (hereafter QJ, Rychner; 1967), works by contradiction. Under this title, a parody of a prayer to the Virgin, one finds a series of disappointments which await the married man, whose situation is compared to that of a fish caught in a net. The anonymous author presents himself as an impartial observer. In fact he is attempting to demonstrate a thesis, that marriage is a trap, and he provides a very plausible case from courtship to old age in order to do so. It is thus useless to look to the QJ, whose vision of matrimony is determined by an ideology, for any realism in the modern sense of the term. One finds that there is nothing on the setting of married life; one can glean only a few imprecise notions of the social conditions of spouses, small property owners, or comfortably fixed peasants.

Nevertheless, it is possible to read this text at several levels in such a way as to find material for reflection on marriage in the Middle Ages. The first and most accessible level is that of the observed gestures, customs, and actual practices. A priori, one can believe that this testimony is drawn from life and one can suppose that the author's thesis did not affect it. The level of interpersonal relations is more delicate to interpret. One need not conclude from the evidence of these texts that quarrels were chronic in medieval marriage, or that marriage was an institution founded on the hostility of the partners. Nevertheless, such works do reflect structural conflicts, contradictions that were inherent in the matrimonial system of the Middle Ages. What sorts of power do confrontations within marriage reveal? What sorts of bonds or loyalties were there among the kin group united by marriage? Might not the very topos of antifeminism, which colors all of this literature, expose the very real fears which haunt mentalities imbued with disdain for women, fears with the strength of myth like that of adultery?

The poetry to which I refer, appearing at the end of the fifteenth century and developing from the QJ, is easier to interpret. While the QJ was certainly intended to be read, and hence was addressed to the literate minority, these poems were clearly intended to be recited in public. Hence they serve to fill the gap left by written sources on popular attitudes. These are genuine occasional pieces, recited by the jongleur or local storyteller during the marriage feast (Aubailly, 1976:34-39). Parodies of the serious sermon given in church, they take up in an even more satirical and unbridled way the QJ's theme of lamentations against marriage, a theme which assumes special humor in the circumstances of a marriage feast. The excess of the satire allows one to dismiss at the start all realistic interpretations of the examples presented. Though the examples are the same as in the QJ, here the treatment is entirely different. These poems abound in information I would call "folkloric," the descriptions of customs and rituals. "Le doctrinal des nouveaux mariés" (The Newlyweds' Catechism) lists the "laws" of marriage. The doctrine of this poem need only be compared with that of the theologians to determine that it is as much a vulgarization as an extension of their teaching. . "Le sermon nouveau et fort joyeux" (The New and Most Happy Sermon) presents a list of the woes of a married man under the pretext of a chronological account of the episodes which constitute marriage, from courtship to the birth of children. Since each episode allows the storyteller to recall the usages peculiar to it, one can find in this poem a great number of precise details on the customs of engagement, marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth. "Les ténébres de mariage" (The Shadows of Marriage) and "Les secretz et loix de mariage" (The Secrets and Laws of Marriage) describe in some detail the ceremonies associated with childbirth.

The Values of Marriage

Let us first describe broadly the official doctrine of the Church. This doctrine will serve as a reference point to which we may relate social practices and their functions. The attitude of the theologians was based on the affirmation of Saint Paul: "It is good for man to abstain from woman (I Cor. 7,1)," or, better, on the interpretation given Paul by Saint Jerome who radicalized this suggestion, to transform it into a warning: "It is evil for man to unite himself to a woman (Patr. Lat. 23, 218-219)." Jerome thus extended to conjugal relations the negative vision of sexuality which Church orthodoxy had assumed by ranking virginity and chastity as states superior to marriage. This attitude, which represented the main stream of medieval thought, was opposed to natural and social law; from this doctrine was born a fundamentally paradoxical doctrine. Justifying marriage as the lesser of the two evils -"it is better to marry than to burn (I Cor. 7,9)"- canonists and theologians tried to reconcile the ideal of virginity with a state which surrendered reason to the floods of sensuality by adopting the Augustinian triple goods of marriage: proles, fides, sacramentum (children, faith, sacrament). Thanks to the concept of the marriage debt, sexual relations became licit even during the periods of infertility; such was the ambivalence of a doctrine which had to integrate the impulses of nature into a system based on abstinence (Makovski, 1977).

Ecclesiastical literature attempted to prove the weakness of the married state by evoking the material cares which that state entailed (Delhaye, 1951). If their enumeration - discords, jealousies, pains of childbirth, budget difficulties - seems an echo of the antimatrimonial literary tradition, this is hardly surprising, since clerics and the literate population were identical. The ambiguity, if not outright hostility of the literate culture toward a fundamental social institution was not reflected by popular culture. Letters which have survived from this period, written by women of a land-owning class family, the Pastons, are strong evidence that to speak of a woman's life was synonymous with speaking of her marriage (Haskell, 1973). The young women of the Gospels of the Distaffs, who were poorer and who lived in rural areas, also considered marriage as the only possible future: numerous omens informed them of the date of their marriage and of the name of their future husband (EQ, Jannet, 1855:18, 23, 25, 42, 157, 158). Marriage represented an enviable and desirable state for those who, being poor, had to attempt to put together a dowry by serving as domestics. For young men, the creation of a domestic establishment shone as the distant and often inaccessible ideal: the shepherd of Montaillou, Pierre Maury, could never attain this state and passed his life travelling the mountains alone caring for other's flocks.

Of course, the Church did not ignore the social utility of marriage: it made procreation an obligation, the first of its "goods." It also remained mindful of the role of marriage in bringing about social cohesion and exchange. The Church and the laity were in accord in recognizing that marriage bonds were social bonds. But marriage was to increase kinship ties only among Christians; hence the interdiction of unions with heretics or pagans. For a similar reason, to unify and reinforce the community, at Cathar Montaillou, "It was better to marry a believer who had nothing but the shirt on her back than a rich dowager who was not a believer (Le Roy Ladurie, 1975:163)." This exclusion of the other, of whoever belongs to a different community, is but one aspect of the rule of endogamy, the only one which Le Roy Ladurie (1974) recognizes as valid for traditional rural societies.

Constraints and Rules

Endogamy. Village endogamy was evidenced by the hostility shown to a fiance who came from another village; it was sometimes sufficiently strong to disintegrate into open aggression or drawn battle (Vaultier, 1965:11). In general it was ritualized in the custom which demanded that a fiance from another parish give money to the young men of the parish, whether he joined the village or took a woman away to another. The obligation imposed by endogamy appears very clearly in the QJ. As satire, the QJ proceeds to a systematic inversion of all behavior: the situation which it shows is always contrary to what should be and so provokes unhappiness. Disobedience to rules, implicit or not of the marital order provokes misfortune. Krystyna Kasprzyk has shown int her article (1970), entitled "The Fifteen Joys of One Marriage," that we are present at the misadventures of one and the same couple in this work. The satire can be read as the chronicle of a typical family, rather like the correspondence of the Paston family.

The events it portrays may be summarized as follows. Once upon a time, there was a very young girl (14-15 years old) whose parents had left her in ignorance of sex. But one day her mother, seeing her pale and suffering from morning sickness, suspected the worst and guessed, correctly, that she was in fact pregnant (QJ, Rychner, 1967:83-84). The family must make haste to marry the guilty daughter. The prestige of their lineage had led these parents to hope for a good match, a young man from a slightly higher position than their own (QJ, Rychner, 1967:33). In view of this hoped for alliance, they had raised her so as to make her "beautiful and honest" (we have seen her fatal ignorance), hence increasing her marketability to compensate for her slight social inferiority (1). But the situation which now devalued their daughter destroyed this hope. They would have to accept a young man of inferior social position. The mother took the matter in hand (QJ, Rychner, 1967:84). Among the suitors who frequented the house, the girl fixed her choice on a particularly assiduous young man. She succeeded in seducing him, and he married her, without ceremony, to the despair of his parents (QJ, Rychner, 1967:88).

As a satiric work, the QJ speaks in the language of irony, and counter statement: it therefore requires that we consider what would be the inverse of each episode in the account if we are to arrive at what must have been the prevailing rule of social behavior appropriate to each case. Our conclusions from this kind of reading must, of course, be tentative and require confirmation from other sources. Nonetheless, it seems fairly safe to assign the unhappiness which afflicts the couple, throughout the work, to the fact that the man takes a wife whose family is superior to his own (QJ, Rychner, 1957:12; 31; 33, 48, 82-83). The rule implied by this example might be formulated: spouses should be of equal social condition.

The Importance of Lineage. Assigning a quasi-mystical value to lineage is not a characteristic peculiar to the upper classes. The theme returns as a leitmotiv
throughout the QJ in the character of the woman who invokes at every occasion her family superiority. It is in the name of the obligations imposed by her noble lineage that she demands a new dress from her husband (QJ, Rychner, I967:7). Even though she uses it as a ruse, the argument has an incontestable social weight: women of lower station must not be allowed to humiliate her (QJ, Rychner, 1967:57, 67). Le Roy Ladurie confirms for the peasant milieu of Montaillou the force of this concept of lineage which one finds here transposed into a concern for one's house, the maison famine (Le Roy Ladurie, 1975:5187). The family which dreams most strongly of the permanence of its house, that of the curate, occupies a dominant place in the village. The curate imagines a family cell closed on itself in which the two brothers marry their two sisters, although they import a wife for the third (Le Roy Ladurie, 1975:63, 67).

The Opposition of Lineage and Family. We are here at the heart of a contradiction, that which opposes the sentiment of lineage with the bonds of marriage. This opposition is resolved, as Claude LeviStrauss (1969) explains, by the institution of the incest taboo which extended, at the end of the Middle Ages, to cousins of the fourth degree, to relatives by adoption, and to spiritual relations formed by godparenthood at baptism. Our curate recognizes the need for this prohibition in terms which some anthropologists would accept :

At the beginning of the world; brothers knew their sisters carnally, but when many brothers had one or two pretty sisters, each brother wanted to have her or to have them, hence there were many murders. That is why one had to forbid sex between brothers and sisters (Le Roy Ladurie, 1975:86).

For Clergues, too, the interdiction is founded to guarantee exchange. Family ties, however, retain their priority. In the QJ, we constantly see the women receiving visits from her cousins, or pretended cousins. On the other hand, when her husband invites his own relatives, she strives to receive them as poorly as possible (QJ, Rychner, 1967:52-53). The complicity of her mother, her sister, or her cousins in her amorous adventures can be explained by the sense of the privileged relationship of blood, as well as by sexual solidarity (QJ, Rychner, 1967:107-108). The account of the village of Montailiou provides further testimony on this subject. The rarity of affective contacts between spouses, the complicity between the mother and her children indicate the pre-eminence of kinship ties over those of marriage. The brother always retains control over his sister, even after her marriage. If he judges her situation too painful, he can remove her from her husband's home (Le Roy Ladurie, 1975:280; also QJ, Rychner, 1967:33).

Prestige vs Social Value. Marriage weaves a network of relations among families. Two families hope, in allying themselves, to consolidate or increase both their economic power and their social prestige. Toward this end, the family-type of the QJ tries to find for its daughter a spouse from a slightly higher social level. This effort requires numerous sacrifices, including the accumulation of a dowry and an education which will assure the exchange value of the girl. "Beautiful and honest," she can be accepted in spite of her social inferiority. Her virginity guarantees the honor of the family; on the other hand, a stain on her purity devalues her and lowers the standing of her family, (QJ, Rychner, 1967:33). This explains her enforced ignorance and the fact that her parents looked forward to marrying her as she attained puberty. The tendency to marry at puberty, which one finds in other literary works (e.g., "Les cent nouvelles nouvelles," Sweetser, 1966: 545­557), is confirmed by Pierre Desportes' statistics on the city of Reims in the fourteenth century. "Women married young, often at the onset of puberty, at 12-13, and normally before 20; the average age was between I5 and 16 (Desportes, 1966:501; cf. Haskell, 1973:466)."

A late poem from the sixteenth century, "Apologie des chamberieres qu'ont perdu leur marriage a la Blanque" (a lottery) describes the fate of poor girls who had no exchange value (Montaiglon, 1855:11, 270277). Placed as servants, they had to amass some savings before they could be considered as possible spouses. To the extent that they are out of the marriage circuit, one sees in them an attitude of sexual permissiveness in which they become the sexual toys of their masters or of other domestics in the house. This image is not simply exaggerated parody. The work of Bronislav Geremek (1976) on fringe groups in Parisian society of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and of Jacques Rossiaud (1976a, 1976b) on prostitution in Provence and in the Rhdne valley during the same period, presents the same picture. Hence a criterion of moral excellence, virginity, becomes the sign of social success; inversely, the moral value of a young woman is increasingly suspect according to her social inferiority.

Freedom of Choice. Let us look further in the QJ for rules governing marriage. One recalls that the mother, taking charge of the affair, teaches her daughter how to seduce the most assiduous of her suitors. Later, the young woman, makes a point of reminding her husband that he was the choice of her heart, even though better candidates were eager for her. The parents of the young man pardon their son, even though he married in the face of their disapproval and without ceremony (QJ, Rychner, 1967:89). In order to deduce from this episode which customs represent the norm, let us keep in mind the ironic character of the QJ and pursue a "negative" reading. Spouses did not choose each other: the transaction was customarily performed by the intervention of a third party. The father (not the mother), a relative, neighbors, the parish priest could arrange a marriage alliance (Le Roy Ladurie, 1975:270, 122-123, 144-146; QJ, Rychner, 1967:100; Vaultier, 1965:10). The forgiveness of the parents of the young man who marries without their permission was not the rule (cf. Noonan, 1973). The Paston family never pardoned the clandestine marriage of their daughter with their steward and drove her from the family circle (Haskell, 1973:466-467).

This is not to say that people were forced to give up their personal choices; inclinations usually revealed themselves before it came time to make a personal choice. Within limits described below, young men exercised a certain freedom of choice. The period of visiting gave them certain liberties and authorized certain intimacies (QJ, Rychner, 1967:39) which could go quite far in rural situations: There, the encounters during which the man could choose his future wife were occasioned by fairs, feastdays and above all wakes (2). They became ritualized, publicized by the participation of the entire group in the exchange being prepared. This is why the couple's marriage as described in the QJ without publication of bans, not ritualized and almost secret, though legal went against the imperatives of the social group (Kelly, 1975:163-173). On this point, a conflict arose between the social practice and clerical authority. The latter insisted on the free choice of the couple; either because they wished to offer them a last chance to choose the celibate state, or because they wished to insist on the sacramental aspect of the union (Molin, 1975:45, 173). The church condemned what it called the venal aspect of marriage. Such was the internal conflict of a society in which kinship structures were still fundamental in spite of the efforts of Christian ideology which sought to become dominant. Whatever the bonds created by marriage, the exchanges which it established constituted the connective tissue of the social milieu, as the customs surrounding marriage demonstrate.

Rites

The poems, which because of their rich notations of gestures and customs serve here as a guide, follow a chronological order from engagement to the birth of children, as they enumerate the evils which afflict a married man. The ritual gestures can be grouped in three sequences: the engagement, the marriage ceremony itself, and the birth of the first child. Each of these sequences employs an ensemble of parallel practices. To avoid repetition, I should like to treat these customs not chronologically, as they appear in the text, but according to their underlying purposes. There are two such purposes, separate but not mutually exclusive, which seem to inform each set of rites: first, to publicize the union by the intervention of the group at each stage; and second, to symbolize the exchange being concluded by a series of gifts required of the groom and his family, and then of the husband.

The Exchange. The Sermon on the Evils of Marriage lists the ritual and obligatory gifts from the groom to his fiancee, to his in-laws, to their family, and to the youth of the village (Montaiglon, 1855:11, 9):

Moreover, if he agrees or becomes engaged, he must organize the evening dance and serve a feast. When the day of the wedding arrives, he must receive in great pomp and buy food, hire minstrels and jongleurs, butlers and roasters, and he must hang and decorate the room with branches and rushes. He must also give his closest relatives dresses, pourpoints, shoes, hats, slippers, hoods, corsets and to the young girls of the group, ribbon and favours all day.

Echoing the hospitality expected of him at his marriage, the father of a new baby also has social obligations. He must offer drinks and food to the relatives and neighbors at ritualized visits to his wife during her lying in: eight days, fifteen days, then three weeks after the birth for celebrations ("Les secretz et loix de mariage," Montaiglon,1855:I11,178­179). The contributions of the husband on the day of the marriage were not limited to gifts of objects, clothes, or jewelry; he had also to give of himself, since custom required him to serve his guests the marriage meal, or at least to direct the serving. The tribute of gifts required in exchange for a woman may illustrate the principle of reciprocity which Claude Levi­Strauss sees at the origin of the marriage exchange.

Nonetheless, we may, question the symmetry of these exchange processes and ask who was the immediate beneficiary. The magnitude of the expenses incurred to organize such feasts properly, that is to say generously, must have created a serious strain on the host's budget; moreover, it was expected that this generosity would be repeated. The marriage alliance must be renewed, hence the feasts and gifts marking the birth of each child. These occasions allowed the ritual reestablishment of the bonds between families; they also provided an opportunity to affirm the prestige of the host and gift-giver. The generosity of the husband, the number of invitations to the wedding, the number of godfathers and godmothers invited to the baptism (EQ, Jannet, 1855:25), and the number of neighbors invited to the childbed were all measures of the power and integrity of the house. Might we not see in this obligation to appear generous, not only the establishment of a network of gifts and counter gifts, but also a reflection of the value accorded by medieval civilization to conspicuous consumption (see Marrou, 1961:61-63; Ruby, 1973:60-69)? The satirical motif of incurred expenses, particularly at the time of visits to new mothers, presents the torments of the husband on this subject, in opposition to the obstinate fidelity of the wife to these customs (QJ, Rychner, 1967:23-24).

The Intervention of the Group. One of the indicators of the curse which weighs on the marriage in the QJ is the hasty and semi­clandestine manner in which it had to be celebrated. According to the conclusions which may be drawn from folkloric sources, this event interested not only the two families but the entire community, and community participation in the marriage was important. By taking a wife, the young man put himself in debt not only to a family, but also to the group of young bachelors from whom he has taken a woman from their field of possible choices. He has entered a privileged state, leaving a sort of semi-marginal state in order to enter into the normal bonds of family. When he has obtained the official right to court, the fiance must recompense the bachelors. Their representative, the "abbot of youth," demands a sum of money from him (Du Cange, 1883­1887:s.v. AbbasJuvenum). Another series of obligations must be paid the very evening of the marriage (Vaultier, 1965; Du Cange, 1883­1887:s.v. Cochetus).

Community participation in marriage took other forms as well. Not only the families concerned, but also the Church and the local traditions determined the date of marriage. They imposed periods of interdiction and periods believed to be unlucky. While the young men decorated the room, the young women, relatives, and neighbors proceeded to the dressing of the bride. In echo of this and in much the same way, they would decorate the room where she was to give birth, and the women of the community would assist her in her labor. The sexual act itself had a public aspect, since it assured the biological continuity of the group ("Sermon joyeux des maulx que l'homme a en mariage," Montaiglon,1855: II, 10; "Les cent nouvelles nouvelles," Sweetser, 1966:198). The nuptial procession corresponded to the ritual of lying in. The Church provided its official consecration by the blessing of the engagement, by the wedding ceremony, and by the blessing of the mother when she rose from childbed. The priest blessed the nuptial bed and exorcised it against evil forces (Molin, 1975:228-236). The QJ gives precise evidence on the epidemic of nouerie d'aiguillettes (a magical practice designed to provoke impotence) which occurred at the end of the Middle Ages (Gelin, 1910; Le Roy Ladurie, 1974b). "The husband can do nothing except when it is pleasing to those who cast the spell (QJ, Rychner, 1967: 79)." When the marriage was consummated, the young bachelors carried in a restoring drink, the chaudeau or caudle; and the new husband, once more forced to make a contribution, had to offer them a banquet.

Fertility

Fertility Celebrated by Ritual. The ritual of benediction exorcised the ever potent evil: the sterility of the marriage bed. The interest taken by groups of youths in the events of the wedding night indicated that the fertility of the couple was the only expected consequence. Village youths reserved to men married during the year certain ritual acts such as kindling fires to evoke fecundity (Van Gennep, 1937-1958: I, 601, 611-613). They made the groom submit to various trials, tests of his virility, and above all they subjected the couple to bullying and demands designed to show that they had entered a state of social limbo. They no longer belonged to the group of youths, but only by becoming parents would they become integrated into the group of adults. The concern of medieval society to celebrate fertility is evident in all aspects of popular culture. The carnival feast, the feast of Brandons (3), evoked and joined at the time of spring renewal the fertility of the earth and that of the woman. According to Mikhail Bakhtine, grotesque images of the body suggested by the carnival, bequeathed by popular comic culture, were those of the fruitful body. Popular remedies against sterility multiplied, pilgrimages specialized in fecundity, and cults of saints (Saints Greluchon, Genitour, and Foutin addressed this problem; Reau, 1959:111, 569, 617). Certain rules of succession confirmed simultaneously the latent distrust of one's inlaws and the fact that this mistrust might be resolved by the transmission of family names and property:

The imperfect integration of sons-in-law or of daughters­in-law into the group into which they come to live is often marked at the time of transmission of property. If no child results from the marriage, in-laws have no right to anything. Only by giving a child to the community will they be fully incorporated into it (Gaudemet, 1952: 104).

Literary Evidence of Feared Fertility. With the songs and ceremonies exalting fertility, the QJ and our poems ring with the voices of those who fear too much of a good thing. "They repent for having mounted the beast so often. May God, they say, take part in the celebration, my wife is pregnant too often! ("Les secretz et loix de mariage," Montaiglon, 1855:111, 183)". The literary theme of the "joys" of marriage always includes the topos of miseries which result from too frequent childbirth: expenses, loans, impoundings, discord between spouses, prostitution (4). Does this topos reflect a real sentiment of uneasiness in the face of too frequent births, provoked by daily financial difficulty? Demographers suggest that after a period of overpopulation, joined to bad economic and climatic conditions in the thirteenth century, France entered a recession which lasted until the end of the fifteenth century, accompanied by a series of well-known calamities: war, plague, famine (Pounds, 1969-70; Le Roy Ladurie, 1967:240-253). One can well understand overpopulation in the thirteenth century, but it would seem less justified at the end of the Middle Ages. Pierre Desportes explains that for Reims in the fourteenth century the number of births was insufficient to assure the renewal of generations and that the importation of domestic servants from the countryside provided the only means to fill the gaps that the rate of mortality had caused in the city's own youth (Desportes, 1966:87-91). For Carpentras, Bautier places the low point around 1473. This nadir preceded a vigorous recovery, though nothing would indicate that the relaxation of demographic pressure was seen as a relief. In difficult times, even if high mortality made care for children more important to the community, it did not make it easier for the individual parents. Thus we may conjecture that the uncertain future at the end of the Middle Ages had led to a sort of Malthusianism (Dubled, 1959).

Medieval Forms of Malthusianism. In the QJ, the wife in childbirth refuses to have other children and complains in these terms: "Cursed be the hour that I was ever born and that I did not abort my child! (QJ, Rychner, 1967:23)." The clear allusion to abortion needs no commentary; it was practiced by women who knew herbs, frequently midwives (Vaultier, 1965:52). The most traditional solution to the problem of unwanted infants, however, remained infanticide. A widespread practice in servile milieux during the early Middle Ages (Coleman, 1974), it continued down to the fifteenth century to be employed by women of marginal status, the castoffs of the matrimonial institution, those whom one can know only through letters of remission (Brissaud, 1972; Billot, 1975). Servant-mistresses, priests' concubines, or rape victims, they saw no other alternative to a birth outside of a family than the abandonment of the infant or infanticide by suffocation or drowning (5). Attached to this problem was that of the mortality resulting from the practice of wetnursing, a habitual one if one can believe the Sermon on the Evils of Marriage ("Sermon joyeux des maulx que l'homme a en mariage," Montaiglon, 1855: II, 5-17; see also Le Roy Ladurie, 1975:304-306), "because it is proper that he search and furnish guardian, godfather, and wetnurse."

Was contraception practiced in the Middle Ages? Only one of our texts mentions it, the Doctrinal of the Newlyweds, a vulgarization of the doctrine (Montaiglon, 1855:1, 13-1-138). J. T. Noonan has found some pertinent literary allusions to illustrate the thought of canonists and theologians on contraceptive practices. On the other hand, the inquisitorial register of Bishop Jacques Fournier contradicts Rev. Riquet and Philippe Aries who both insist, although with different arguments, that the Middle Ages did not know contraception. This register describes in detail the pessary used by Beatrice de Planissoles, chatelaine of the village of Montaillou in her relations with the curate Clergues (Le Roy Ladurie, 1975:248). This example supports the argument of Jean-Louis Flandrin that contraception was practiced in illegitimate relations (Flandrin, 1969: 1388-89). This brief glance at the Malthusian activities of the Middle Ages shows that they are not in total opposiion to the celebration of fertility, since they concern primarily women in illegitimate relation ships. Rather than a contradiction they represent two modalities of the same attitude toward marriage. As Gerson affirms:

Within marriage, just as without, are forbidden all sorts of lecherous contacts which respect neither the order, nor the manner, nor the parties, which nature requires .for procreation. The worst is to fail to respect the natural order, either outside of marriage or, even worse, within marriage ("Le miroir de fame," Glorieux, 1969: VIII, 201).

The taboo against unnatural relations evoked here is directed as much at, their lecherous nature as at their contraceptive aspects. A relation which has for its purpose lechery is forbidden; the fact that it may also be sterile cannot increase the sin; outside of marriage sterility would even tend to diminish it. Jean­Louis Flandrin defines the position of the Church as "nonnatalist," conceiving procreation as the remedy to pleasure and as the means by which to give some content to the concept of conjugal chastity (Flandrin, 1974:33). In the paradoxical QJ, it is not surprising to find this concept taken literally: "On my faith, I believe that the child is ill because of the sin I committed [at his conception]. But God knows that our desire was pure (QJ, Rychner, 1967:68)."

Sexuality and Marriage

At the origin of a concept which carries in itself its own contradiction, one finds again Saint Jerome who excluded sexual pleasure from marriage in calling the man who cherished his wife too tenderly an adulterer (Patr. Lat. 23.281). Is it in obedience to this precept that in the QJ the husband rejoices when his wife acts frigid in his arms? "On my soul, my love, if it isn't your pleasure, I don't want it. The good man rejoices at these words and thinks that she is a cold woman and is uninterested (QJ, Rychner, 1967:10)." In reality weary of an unattractive husband, the woman reserves her passion and "secrets of love" for her lover with whom she will enjoy "that which no husband knows how to do." But what she takes for ignorance is voluntary abstention on the part of her husband. "And moreover, he did not want to do it because it seemed to him that he would teach it to his wife (QJ, Rychner, 1967:35)." In other words, he had to forget in his married state the sexual games of his youth. "Sexual sins, forbidden when one is married, seem to have been regarded with a certain tolerance before marriage, at least in the case of men." The QJ shows us young men in the process of "wandering, composing songs and singing them, looking at pretty women, and looking to have what sport they can with them according to their desires (QJ, Rychner, 1967:6)."

Surely, these are the diversion of young gallants without financial cares. Most young people had to wait until they had acquired a material stability which would permit them to establish a family and become a social unit of productivity before marrying. Would they live in abstinence during this period? Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Pierre Chaunu suppose that they did during the three centuries of the Ancien Regime from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. For this same period, Andre Burguiere attributes to this enforced chastity the development of the spirit of enterprise; though Jean-Louis Flandrin does not believe in this alleged asceticism (Le Roy Ladurie, 1969:359-360; Chaunu, 1972; Burguiire, 1972; Flandrin, 1972). He bases his argument on the indulgence of penitentials and medieval moralists toward the sexual play of children and adolescents. He frequently cites Gerson who addresses the brothers and sisters sleeping together, shepherds and shepherdesses.

Is it justified to extend to the sixteenth century and beyond conclusions which may apply to the Middle Ages? The somewhat obsessive concern of Gerson, who penned confessional treatises for youth, asking them to describe the physical contacts they should not "dare to have if others should be present," attests to a change of attitude, a curiosity already inquisitorial (Glorieux, 1969:VII, 408-409). On the other hand, evidence from one of our poems seems to support Flandrin when he alludes to the extension and the dangers of solitary practices: "in truth, if my husband does not stroke his [penis], he wouldn't want to joust ("Les secretz et loix de mariage," Montaiglon, 1855:111, 180)." But these are only furtive pleasures which cannot satisfy young people awaiting marriage. Those who did not have the means to marry lived publicly in concubmage. Living together before marriage was a practice known in rural regions such as Corsica and the Pays Basque. It was a means to assure the fertility of the future marriage and its ability to establish a family Thus the community found compromise solutions to meet its needs in the face of rules dictated by dogma.

Another example of clear transgression of the rules of Christian morality is found in the existence and vitality of prostitution. Jacques Rossiaud and Bronislav Geremek, who have both studied prostitution from the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, show that it held a real place in medieval society. Medieval society defined for prostitutes a cadre of activity and a type of behavior which distinguished them from honest women, but did not exclude them. One profession among others, prostitution existed not only in the towns but also in the countryside, where it flourished during fairs, markets, pilgrimages, and major agricultural gatherings. In town, it was institutionalized in public houses, and participants were kept in line by a pimp or a manager in charge of managing his small community of women. Prostitution was a genuine local industry which involved all levels of the society: respected and noted persons exercised the functions of procurers, recruitment took place among girls of the lower classes, for the benefit of a stable clientele of young men of the locality.

The thorough integration of this system into medieval society indicates that prostitution answered a real need. Young men and even clerics could frequent prostitutes openly without any sense of guilt. It was even considered good that they enjoyed themselves with prostitutes, since it was a sign of their physical health and social normality. If they frequented the prostibulum they were less likely to be suspected of keeping a mistress or of committing far worse abuses: seduction of young girls or of married women. Hence prostitution served to guarantee public morality and played a part in the fight against adultery. A young man, lacking a legitimate wife, must satisfy himself with the devalued woman of the brothel. Frequenting prostitutes could be interpreted as a rite of youth and, in this period of transition between childhood and adultery, could exercise the same stabilizing functions. The disorder of fornication was allowed to young men to insure a superior order, the stability of the family; it was in fact the same principle, that of choosing the lesser of two evils, which permitted marriage in order to avoid a greater sin, lechery.

We have wandered from our literary sources, which do not mention prostitution directly. It is time to return to them to appreciate the value of the theme of the adulterous woman. Here we find evidence of real anguish. Once established; the family formed a cell, the elementary structure of a society modeled on it (see Gerson, "Le miroir de fame," Glorieux, 1969: VII, 198-199). As an economic unit, it violently rejected all which threatened it with destruction, most notably adultery. The brothel defused the explosive charge of frustration imposed on young men by a marriage structure which united mature husbands with young women. Literary materials describe this disparity of ages within the marriage. The spectre of the cuckold appears in the second "joy" where the wife is younger than her husband, but has the same age, as her lovers. It returns in the fifth, where the aged husband, careladen and miserly, is opposed to the young lover, gay and generous; and finally, in the fifteenth joy which develops the theme of the unfaithful wife (6). The leitmotiv of the impotent old man who cannot satisfy a young wife suggests that the frustrations cut both ways.

United in "abbeys of youth" or "bachelories," young men acted to guarantee matrimonial order, not only for themselves but also for the community to which they belonged (Davis, 1971; Rossiaud, 1976a). They displayed their hostility toward second marriages by organizing charivaris, noisy, mocking and tumultuous processions whose infamous publicity could be avoided by the payment of a compensation to the abbot of youth (Du Cange, 1883-1887: s.v. Charzvarium; Vauitier, 1965: 32). Hence official acceptance or refusal of second marriages, as for first marriages, came through the mediation of groups of young people and of their leader.

To explain the symbolic role of noisy behavior, Claude Levi-Strauss compares into noisy rituals observed on the occasion of eclipses noted throughout the world. He remarks that a power as great as that of noise is often associated with an undesired conjunction (Levi-Strauss, 1964:292­295). In the case of remarriage, the normal sequence of marriages is disrupted; the appropriation of a spouse by someone whose first marriage should have put him out of circulation is resented as a frustration. Left out, the youths react with ritualized agression and disorder to the transgression of an order that they cannot truly contest since they hope some day to participate in it. The QJ reveals the latent hostility based on this process of mediation. The ninth "joy" describes the cruel impatience of the elder son toward his old, impotent, but still living father. "Possibly the elder son would like to take over the direction of family business with the support of his mother, like someone anxious that his father should die. Such children are not rare (QJ, Rychner, 1967:73)."

The Position of the Wife

The citation above, if one can believe it, suggests a patriarchal family fraught with conflict. The elder son, already an adult; only with difficulty reins his impatience to control the property he will inherit (QJ, Rychner, 1967:75). He must still obey an old father who is so obstinate as to continue living! But with the complicity of his mother, he tries to convince people that the old man is in his second childhood, and he attempts to "place the old man under his guardianship (QJ, Rychner, 1967:76)." In spite of the regional variations of inheritance customs summarized by Jean Yver and the different conceptions of family structure they reveal, at the end of the Middle Ages the family followed a patriarchal model; the husband and father of the family exercised the authority. A list of female failings presented in the satirical pieces can tell us, by implication, something about the position of women in this structure (Neff, 1900).

These failings can easily be classified into two categories: those which make of women lecherous beasts, the originators and disseminators of sin, and those which criticize the dominant role that they wish to take in the marriage. Women's refusal to assume "their place" ranges from disobedience to despotism, passing through all the degrees of irritability and wickedness. This biased portrait suggests a confrontation between a husband convinced of his right to authority and a wife forced to accept the status of inferior reserved for her by society. Canon law concerning her is based on a contradiction which makes her at once an object of veneration and the creature responsible for original sin who cannot be the equal of man. Her legal status passes her from her father's guardianship to that of her husband and forces her to submit to the discipline that the husband exercises over her. The husband administers the patrimony of his wife, and the recourse that she might have in case of alienation of her own goods is illusory (EQ, Jannet, 1855:15, 16). Towards the end of the Middle Ages, the legal status of women was further reduced (Metz, 1962; Petot, 1962). An object of exchange between two families in marriage negotiations, the wife remained an object in the hands of a husband often considerably older than she. As a consequence of marrying very young, she often had no time to acquire any autonomy and more easily remained submissive.

Society, seeking a state of homeostasis, permitted periods of transgression and role reversal in order to neutralize the frustrations which resulted from this situation. Celebrations and certain circumstances in everyday life permitted temporary inversions of the hierarchy and acted as pressure valves by which conflicts within the system could be relieved. The period of childbirth, for example, freed the wife from the authority of her husband: "he had to sleep in the kitchen so that she might be free of him until she was up again ("Sermon des maulx de mariage," Montaiglon, 1855:11, 14)." During pregnancy, the myth of the pregnant woman's cravings for peculiar foods required that the husband (7) obey her slightest whim under threat of affecting the child adversely (QJ, Rychner, 1967:18)." The ritual of the couvade or "man­childbed" carried the role inversion, process to its extreme, since the husband was confined to bed and took the place of his wife ("Aucassin et Nicollette," Roques, 1936:29-32; Cohen, 1951). Besides these periods of license, certain holidays, which involved ritualized manifestations of freedom also permitted women to express their desires. Carnival, the bonfires of Saint John, and especially the feasts of May put women in the forefront and liberated them, at least symbolically, from the obligation of marriage: to ignore love in a relationship designed to assure the biological continuity of the group. Songs and carols led by the May queen celebrated liberty and love chosen at will; unhappily married women became as free as young girls and threw off the authority of husbands relegated to groups of old people. The village youth, however, did not lose all control: they were responsible for the May day gathering of leaves with which they decorated the doors of young girls who were to marry; they also designated publicly those whom they found unworthy by attaching harmful plants to their doors, branches of hazel or of elder (Jeay, 1977).

Jacques Rossiaud sees in the youth organizations' role, censoring the virtue of girls, proof of the antifeminism of medieval society in the fifteenth century (Rossiaud, 1976:93-95). This antifeminism characterizes the satirical literature of the period which shows the reality of male domination. Rossiaud describes varying degrees of this antifeminism: it is stronger in the lower classes than among the bourgeoisie. A girl who is not irreproachableand a girl whose social situation does not guarantee her virtue cannot pretend to be so­falls into the ranks of common women. At the mercy of the opinion fostered by the local youth, she is the designated victim of group rapes. The youth associations of the bourgeoisie; in contrast, according to Rossiaud, permit the modification of the female condition by raising it: feasts and social events give the opportunity to try out new relationships between men and women, the freedom to experience behavior otherwise forbidden.

This improvement, which was both slight and slow, does not really concern the fifteenth century. If the rituals of role reversal were able to change the relationships of power in some way, this was only true of later centuries. For the post-medieval period, one can accept the optimism of Natalie Davis, who sees in the practices of role reversal a means for those dominated to refuse the domination that they experienced (Davis,1975:124­151). But for the fifteenth century this analysis seems premature. Nothing contradicts the hierarchical conception of the couple at the heart of the married state; which is the only acceptable view permitted an honest woman if she has not entered religious life. The QJ (Rychner, 1967:81) exaggerates by rendering tragic the consequences of the separation of spouses: the woman can only go out to debauch herself; there is no other end for her but debasement. "Sometimes such a woman goes to town, from bedroom to bedroom, and gives herself over to pleasure." Again, one must not take the QJ literally. The authenticity of its evidence is to be found in its description of the vulnerable situation of the woman whose circumstances or poverty keep her outside of the structure of marriage (Metz, 1962:95; Lorcin, 1975).

Conclusion

The literary texts which we have taken as a point of departure, the QJ and the poems it inspired, have enabled us to establish tentatively a set of rules, to outline ritual behavior, and to identify certain themes which, I believe, gave shape to the institution of marriage at the end of the Middle Ages. One cannot accord these rules extracted from the QJ the weight of explicitly formulated laws. It is necessary, rather, to understand them as social constraints with a normative character dictated by the subtleties of matrimonial strategies. Other sources, particularly folkloric evidence, and evidence of a rural milieu in Montaillou, do not contradict these rules, but give them shape and definition. The high degree of detail in the description of rituals and customs supports our confidence in these texts and encourages us to take seriously the thematic motifs which run through them. The studies of demographers, the observations of historians, have proven that these themes, even the most trite such as the obsession with adultery, did not have a uniquely "literary" reality. Such studies underline more precisely the social implication of themes about which literary texts do not provide enough information. Thus, for example, the negative view of fecundity in our poems requires correction. In fact, a negative attitude coexisted with the celebration of fertility. Medieval behavior was rarely unifocal, rather it was characterized by its ambivalence. The themes which surround the official suppression of sensuality, the status of youths, transgressions, all carry the same ambivalence. To permit the expression of human nature in certain ritualized circumstances was at the same time to reaffirm the cultural principles; the model of a family structural hierarchy under the authority of the husband and father could easily be found behind the frequent presentation in our texts of family quarrels and confrontations.

It has been difficult to resist the temptation to follow, these texts down all the paths that they wished to lead the reader, happy to discover that they did not offer too distorting a mirror. It would seem almost as if the supplementary sources which helped with my interpretations of the texts were made to confirm them. Like the QJ, they came from traditional rural milieux, and dealt particularly with long standing customs. Study of the QJ tends to identify in medieval society, even in the fifteenth century, certain characteristics of "primitive" societies: restricted exchange of marriage partners, social status due to prestige acquired through generosity, an attitude of reserve concerning sexuality, a fixed system of taboos; ritualization, and ambivalence of transgression behavior. They certainly fail to inform us about the more dynamic, urban, merchant groups who serve as indicators of the transition to a more complex type of society. These signs of change can more easily be seen and studied in the sixteenth century than in the fifteenth.

(1) One had to be careful to avoid, as the Chevalier de la Tour Landry explained to his daughters "that a woman should love a man of lower extraction than she because if she should marry him, her friends would see it a debasement . . .Nor someone so much higher than her that he could not be her lord (Montaiglon, 1854:254-255)."

(2) About the institution of wakes as a means of meeting and frequentation, see the testimony of two writers from the sixteenth century. "Contes d'Eutrapel," Du Fail, 1585:11, 6-7; and "Les escraignes difonnoises," Tabourot des Accords; 1614: III, 229-232; see also van Gennep, 1937-1958: 1. 260-263.

(3) During this ritual of fertility, on the eve of the first Sunday of Lent or on the feast night of Saint John, men and women ran with torches across fields and orchards in order to obtain abundant crops. See EQ, Jannet, 1555:40.

(4) “Les secretz et loix de marriage,” Montaigion, 1855: III, 183; and farces like "Farce de Jolyet" and "Farce de Colin," Viollet-le-Duc, 184-1857: I, 5062, and 11, 246-247.

(5) Jean Gerson goes as far as considering child neglect a crime, "oppression par male garde" (Glorieux, 1969: VII, 398). See also Chaucer's "Parson's Tale," which mentions "overlying," the "accidental" smothering of the newborn child in the bedclothes.

(6) The fear of being a cuckold is precisely the object of Rabelais, "Tiers Livre".

(7) Sermon joyeux des maulx que I'homme a en manage". Montaiglon, 1855: 11, 14; "Les secretz et loix de manage": 111, 174-175; "Les tenebres de manage": 1, 23. As for the negative consequences of not fulfilling a pregnant woman's craving, this could lead to defective births, harelips, and other monstrosities. See EQ. Jannet, 1855:19, 23-24, 26, 158; and Belmont. 1973.