The Two Paths to Marriage: the Preliminaries of Noble Marriage in Late Medieval France

Abstract

In medieval France, preliminaries were instrumental to the formation of noble marriage. Judicial and literary documents reveal the existence of two forms of preliminaries. The first involved family and friends, combined embassies, formal meetings and celebrations, and created unions on a political and economical basis. This dominant model was challenged by a personal model where enamoured couples courted and wed regardless of parental consent. Advocating values of love and individual choice partly coinciding with ecclesiastical doctrine, but contrary to aristocratic matrimonial ideals, it was perceived as a threat to the nobility’s model of marriage and was therefore bound to remain marginal.