It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a medieval couple in possession of a good fortune, must automatically be man and wife. Or rather, this is an assumption that is all-too easily made by historians of the earlier Middle Ages--this reviewer included--that marriage was the standard mode of living together at the time. As it turns out, however, the period between the sixth and twelfth centuries witnessed a multitude of variations on that theme; then, just as now, there were many ways of being a “couple” besides the one we see most often represented in the majority of the extant (normative) source material. That this seemingly obvious point is indeed worth making, and that exploring it in-depth throws a great deal of new light on previously held assumptions about the practicalities of early medieval life, is made very clear by Emmanuelle Santinelli-Foltz in her first monograph. In it, she studies “la question du couple” by taking on the sources free of any institutional or historiographical bias. The resulting argumentation asks all the right questions and is very clear about which of those we can actually answer if we free ourselves from our modern assumptions about medieval life. As such, this monograph is an impressive feat of scholarship that is sure to be an inspiration for many students of the early Middle Ages ready to explore their sources with a fresh set of questions.
As already demonstrated by the numerous graphs and tables, as well as the appendices, which take up a full one-sixth of the book (and which, with their overview of the relevant vocabulary and florilegium of relevant texts in translation, form a supremely useful resource per se) Santinelli-Foltz is a thorough and methodical worker. This is evident from the structure of the book as a whole as well, in which she systematically works from the broadest, almost abstract, question on what a “couple” actually is all the way to as close as we may get inside the minds of these past people actually living together. In fact, it is this tension, between these two poles that appears as a leitmotif throughout her book. The very first header of the introduction already sets the tone: “Une notion difficile à definir, une réalité difficile à saisir” (a concept [that is] difficult to define, a reality [that is] difficult to grasp). Difficulty is, indeed, the name of the game--but that only makes this book all the more rewarding to read.
In the introduction, Santinelli-Foltz situates herself methodologically and historiographically, taking special care to explain the problems with “recognizing couples” (12-17) and the “pitfalls” in the sources (17-25), before proposing to use methods from (historical) anthropology to cut through the particular emic/etic divide facing modern historians dealing with this topic. She then also proposes a division in three major phases of thinking about conjugality: the period before the Carolingian era, which shows a multitude of norms and practices that were very much dependent on local contexts and preoccupations; the “Carolingian moment,” when those in power made a first attempt at cutting through this multiplicity of realities in order to bring some semblance of order to the world; and the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the Church, under the guise of what later would be called the “Gregorian Reforms,” showed an increased tendency to regulate not only the public appearance of marital practices, but also their perception and the religious ideology behind it. In a way, then, the elevation of marriage to one of the sacraments marks the end point to Santinelli-Foltz’s exploration. The rest of the book, in a very small nutshell, is an exploration of this methodology: in a quartet of chapters, the book deals with the tensions between “what the authors knew,” “what the people felt,” and “what we can say about it.” Once again, it is her reticence in providing unambiguous answers that is especially commendable. Couples, it seems, are complicated. Santinelli-Foltz never makes it seem as if there are easy solutions, and while this makes it a challenging (if not to say: difficult) read at times, it is all the more rewarding for it.
The first chapter (37-91) is about “couples” as a norm. Here, we learn about the manifold ways in which people throughout the period studied have dealt with the wishful thinking of authorities--ecclesiastical or otherwise--to make married life the standard of living for adults in the Christian west. This is where we first encounter what it means, as a scholar, to deal with the tension between top-down discourse and lived experience. It seems clear that people did not get married simply because they were ordered to do so by the powers that be. the question remains why people opted for marriage after all. The second chapter (93-143) builds upon this question by moving from the couple as an ideal to the couple as an “enigma” (echoing the title of that particular chapter). Rather than looking at how couples were defined at the time, this chapter takes the more anthropological approach to exploring how and why couples--specific couples, but also the concept--persisted. Living together, it turns out, was an investment for everyone involved. It was, in short, a way to make life in medieval society a bit more manageable. In this chapter, it is mostly the outside appearance of stability that is the focus: the idea that entering into a marriage or similar arrangement represented a willingness to conform to the social contract of a given time and place.
How this worked in practice is the subject of the next two chapters. In chapter 3 (145-218), the author attempts to show how the shift from the very pragmatic interpretation of marriage in the fifth and sixth centuries to the more idealistic and spiritual ideas developed between the ninth and twelfth centuries would have affected the way people in a marriage actually lived their lives together. Santinelli-Foltz has called this chapter “living, doing and appearing together” (Vivre, faire et paraître ensemble), and proceeds to show that these are, indeed, different sides of the same triangular coin. It was, she concludes, not simply a “unit,” but really a kind of micro-community, and should be treated as such by modern historians. The final, and arguably most challenging, chapter (219-286), tries to find out how the members of that small community dealt with being part of a couple. This chapter especially is a masterclass in reading against the grain and/or between the lines, drawing on minute clues in the sources (from capitularies and charters to letters and treatises) to show how the people producing our texts were acutely aware that actual humans were involved in the marriages they celebrated as the norm.
It is this personal aspect of Santinelli-Foltz’s analysis that is the major strength of this monograph. We are never allowed to forget that this is a study of actual human beings, not of the ideal pictures painted in the majority of the sources. As such, even people not directly interested in questions of “married life” in the Middle Ages will find much that will pique their interest in this book. Yet, herein also lies the part with which some readers might take issue. At the end of the day, after all, the move from source-based idealism and representation to the “lived experience” of the people themselves is one made by the modern historian. Readers of this book are, in the end, faced with the choice whether or not to accept this lateral move, or if they prefer an approach that does not look beyond the intentions of the authors. These approaches are not mutually exclusive, of course. As shown, for example, by David D’Avray’s Papal Jurisprudence 385-1234: Social Origins and Medieval Reception of Canon Law (Cambridge 2022), which also deals with marriage and the way it was regulated, the top-down reading of the sources is an approach that yields fascinating results just as well. Santinelli-Foltz, however, tries to take us into the minds of the people living with these norms, and thereby opens a whole new set of research possibilities.
Readers looking for minute deep dives into singular sources may find such possibilities in the narrative presented here already: this book takes a helicopter view to the material and therefore may leave some people wanting even more. That said, Couples et Conjugalité au Haut Moyen Âge is an open invitation to pursue those questions ever further: into different times, different religious discourses, or indeed in greater detail. To finish, then, with another blatant paraphrase of Pride and Prejudice (itself a great novel exploring the norms, praxis and experience of “couples and conjugality”): we should be ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the author, who, by bringing this way of reading the sources into the limelight, has been the means of uniting—and opening—ever new avenues of research.