Unmarriages

"Karras challenges the modern notion that "traditional marriage" was the only acceptable sexual relationship between a man and a woman, and the only alternative to a life of solitude in the Middle Ages. . . . An impressive and complex undertaking."—Law and History Review

"A carefully researched exploration of the variety-and ambiguity-of marriages in the Middle Ages. Karras combines rigorous scholarship with fascinating personal stories that are often as engaging as a good novel."—Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage

"Ruth Mazo Karras turns the history of medieval marriage upside down and inside out, demonstrating the ubiquity in medieval Europe of male-female couples who did not marry. . . . In a sweep that stretches from ancient Rome to Reformation Europe and from Italy to Iceland, Karras has again produced a must-read for medievalists. Unmarriages cracks open the myth of 'traditional' marriage and reveals a truer, messier world of opposite-sex coupling. It should be assigned reading for all who bewail the decline of so-called traditional marriage values."—Judith M. Bennett, University of Southern California

"This important book summons from the shadows those heterosexual relationships that were destined to become marginal. Through an admirably wide array of sources, Karras retrieves forgotten arrangements like concubinage, clerical marriage, bigamy, and clandestine unions, and in so doing reanimates the couples who shunned conventional marriage. This work is a must for historians of gender, sexuality, and marriage. It helps us understand not only what society would become, but what it might have been"—Dyan Elliott, Northwestern University

"Imaginative and masterfully executed, Umarriages reveals the talent of an accomplished scholar. The book ranges boldly and widely across the Middle Ages and beyond, from slave marriages in the later Roman Empire to reimaginings of the marital bond in the era of the Reformation, and investigates sources as diverse as Icelandic sagas, canon law, and criminal registers from fifteenth-century Paris. Karras peppers her analysis with fascinating vignettes that personalize her findings, illuminating the impact of law, social custom, and religious thought on a sampling of women's lives: Augustine of Hippo's unnamed concubine, the Frankish aristocrat Waldrada, Abelard's Heloïse, Katherine Swynford (an ancestor of King Henry VIII of England), and others less socially significant but no less compellingly studied. Her conclusions about changing definitions of the marital union, its imprecise boundaries, and the varied alternatives to it-cohabitation and concubinage, clerical marriages and marriages between individuals of different faiths, to name but a few-bear meaningful repercussions for modern debates about marriage."—Mathew Kuefler, San Diego State University