Free Another Insane Devotion by Peter Trachtenberg Page A

one of their friends, in the street, or whether they needed a public figure, a schoolmaster, to do it, or a real priest,
or whether they could just as legitimately take the vows on their own, without anybody officiating. The vows might be short; for example: “I swear to thee, Marguerite, that I will love no other woman but thee to the day of my death.” “Paul, I pledge my word that I will have no other husband than you to the day of my death.” (In the French, Paul addresses his fi-ancée in the familiar second person, tu ; Marguerite uses the formal vous. ) Symbolic gifts would be exchanged. The couple would shake hands or kiss. Sometimes, the boy would seal his commitment by putting his tongue in his beloved’s mouth, announcing that he was doing it “in the name of marriage.”
    The last gesture suggests a popular attempt to resolve an old theological debate as to whether marriage was defined by a sexual act or a verbal one: by fucking or an oath. The first definition justified abducting and raping the young woman who caught your fancy, which explains those peasant ceremonies in which the groom and his friends pretended to kidnap the bride, who pretended to be upset about it. But it seemed like something was missing. In the twelfth century, Gratian formulated a two-part definition of marriage:
    It must be understood that betrothal begins a marriage, sexual union completes it. Therefore between a betrothed man and a betrothed woman there is marriage, but begun; between those who have had intercourse, marriage is established.
    Other churchmen argued that all that was needed was the verbal consent of both parties, two people saying, “I do.” After
all, if sex was what made a marriage, one could say that Mary and Joseph had lived in sin.
    It’s startling to see how matter-of-fact the medieval church could be about sex, down to earnest discussions of the morality of the female orgasm and whether a woman whose husband came before she did was allowed to fondle herself: fourteen out of seventeen theologians said she could. It was a practical application of Paul’s teaching: “The husband must give the wife what is due to her, and the wife equally must give her husband his due” (1 Cor. 7, 1–3). The idea of the debt, or debitum, informed all of marriage, gave shape to it the way the skeleton gives shape to the human body. It was the simple counterpart to elaborate contracts like the one between Guy and Jocelin, made not between two fathers but between a wife and a husband and governing not the division of property but the sharing of duty and pleasure. The poor had no property, but they could have orgasms, and people took it for granted that wives as well as husbands were entitled to them. Just give me my propers when you get home. Both Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin sing “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” and both their versions are considered definitive.
    It makes sense that the church would concern itself with the pleasure of the married couple. A marriage in which both spouses get their propers will be fecund and stable, producing children for the glory of God and the increase of Mother Church. Satisfied spouses are less likely to go splashing around in the concupiscent puddles of the flesh. The sex the church sanctioned wasn’t concupiscent. It was temperate, cheerful, orderly, the payment of a debitum. Who gets hot and
bothered writing out the month’s checks? Marriage was chiefly an economic relationship. Its purpose was to increase the property of propertied families or to maximize the labor of two individuals—and more, when children came—by joining them in a common domestic enterprise. In medieval art, the common people are often depicted laboring, the men in the fields, the women in the house. There’s a painting I like in which three housewives stand proudly amid dozens of perfect cannonballs of dough they’ve rolled and patted into shape and