Clerical marriage during the time of the Reformation raised issues of theology for the reformers, but for the Catholics it flagged issues of morality in its verdict that theology was simply being used in the service of immorality. This is best underscored in the matrimonial case involving Martin Luther and Katherine von Bora. Luther's writings on the subject of marriage had to be applied to...
Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker (1504-75) defended priestly matrimony throughout his career. His life, library, and letters provide counterevidence to Eric Carlson's argument that the clergy failed to receive marriage enthusiastically and were themselves responsible for its slow acceptance in England. Parker maintained his positive attitude toward marriage through five decades of...
Much work has been accomplished in recent years on the relationship between the English and continental reformations, but research is focused primarily on the impact of Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr Vermigli on English theologians and university students during the reign of Edward VI. Comparatively little has been written about Heinrich Bullinger, whose writings, translated into English more...
Scholars have wondered why Rabelais dedicated his Third Book (1546) to Marguerite de Navarre, since the book is filled with ridicule of women. In attempting to discover why Rabelais might have done this, the following essay suggests that he and Marguerite shared an interest in marriage, and in particular, they both opposed clandestine marriage, then under discussion by the Council ofTrent. In...
The Androgyne takes its name from the myth in Plato's Symposium. Gen. 2, where man and wife are to be one flesh, gives us the marriage androgyne. From Gen. 1, in which Adam is male and female, we have another sort of androgyne, this one purely of the spirit. Drawing on these sources, Renaissance writers made use of the androgyne as a figure of desire (both heterosexual and homosexual), of...
Historians agree that early modern Spaniards' sexual behavior deviated significantly from norms set forth in royal and canon law. The question of how Spaniards resolved the tensions between their sexual norms as encoded in law and their nonnormative sexual behaviors has yet to be addressed. This essay argues that seventeenth-century Spaniards mitigated such tension by using laws and legal...