Dyan Elliot

Spiritual Marriage

Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

The early Christian and medieval practice of spiritual marriage, in which husband and wife mutually and voluntarily relinquish sexual activity for reasons of piety, plays an important role in the development of the institution of marriage and in the understanding of female religiosity. Drawing on hagiography, chronicles, theology, canon law, and pastoral sources, Dyan Elliott traces the history of spiritual marriage in the West from apostolic times to the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Seitenzahl: 392
• Erscheinungstermin: 5. November 1995
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 234mm x 156mm x 23mm
• Gewicht: 665g
• ISBN-13: 9780691010885
• ISBN-10: 0691010889
• Artikelnr.: 21900997

Autorenporträt

Dyan Elliott

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
3
1
"A Place in the Middle": Intramarital Chastity as Theoretical
Embarrassment and Provocation
16
2
Spiritual Marriage as Insoluble Problem or Universal Nostrum?
51
3
Eleventh-Century Boundaries: The Spirit of Reform and the Cult of the
Virgin King
94
4
The Conjugal Debt and Vows of Chastity: The Theoretical and Pastoral
Discourse of the High and Later Middle Ages
132
5
Spiritual Marriage and the Penitential Ethos
195
6
Virgin Wives
266
Conclusion
297
Appendixes
303
Select Bibliography
321
Index
355

Rezensionen

Elliot masterfully examines why female spirituality was perceived as a threat to the church and society at large, challenging the boundaries of sanctity and heresy. . . . By tracing the downward trajectory of holy women through medieval society's progressive reliance on inquisitional procedure, Elliot argues that inquisitional mechanisms for assessing female spirituality created confusion between the saintly and the heretical; these efforts to constrain female spirituality were part of a larger program of constraining women.