So hilariously through most of my period consummation was actually much less important for the "realness" of the marriage. That was something that became more important again after the Reformation, because the Protestants de-sacralized marriage and even though the Catholics didn't, there was a significant knock-on effect that got more intense as time went on, getting into the stuff you're familiar with.
The theological rule for marriage in my period was: you were married if you said you were married in "words of the present tense" (eg "I marry you" or "I do" in response to the "do you"), or if you said you'd GET married in words of the FUTURE tense and then had sex (so yes: boys who got girls to sleep with them on the basis of "I'll totally marry you later" were absolutely dragged in front of canon courts to discover hahaha ACTUALLY, bro, you ARE married now already).
This was a hard line; your only way out of it in terms of "annulled for non-consummation" was in fact if one party (usually the man) had DECEIVED the other party about whether he was CAPABLE of consummating. So eg if a woman found out that her husband was impotent and he'd KNOWN (or should have known) that he was impotent before they married, then the marriage could be annulled.
There were detailed examinations for this by "knowledgeable women of the village". (So a dude couldn't get OUT of a marriage free and clear by lying ABOUT this just because he didn't want to sleep with his wife.) Which yes does in fact mean that there are court cases where as far as we know two or three village matrons took a guy into another room to determine whether or not he could get it up via a handjob in order to determine whether a marriage could be annulled, because the mediaevals are WONDERFUL like that.
On the other hand if he became impotent after the marriage or didn't know or hadn't known, nope!
Otherwise, if you said "I do" and there was no destructive impediment (ie thing that made marriage theologically impossible regardless of anything else), you were married. End of story. The sacrament had been performed, the union was complete in God's eyes, that's it!
The Church had to work for a few centuries to ESTABLISH this, mind, and as I said it fell apart come the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and also obviously the powerful did their best to ignore it or get the Pope to magically annul things based on impediments they either made up, or which should have made the marriage impossible AND other FUTURE marriages impossible, but who cares I'm the King (looking at you Eleanor and Henry . . . )whenever they could! But the other flipside was the obsession with the Witnessed Consummation was a later thing that came back in AFTER the Reformation thanks to the effect that Protestant desacralization of marriage had on the entire affair, and attendant theological confusion, especially when countries were switching back and forth on what they were every ten years or so.
Shakespeare's era would have been at the wobbly point in time for this one, but still solidly erring on the side of, even the nobility were mostly reserving their daughters until at least late teenagerhood if not beyond, or if they surrendered them were doing so with retinues and support staff.
And again: outliers definitely happened! But there's a difference as we know bob between the outliers and the norms. (I have some speculation about the changing role of women OVERALL also having an effect on how willing the bride's family were to have younger women in the diplomatic role - there's also a strong indication a lot of the time in my period that they also tended not to be interested in sending the daughter out to the husband until she was old enough to be a USEFUL driver of their dynasty's interests, which a 14 year old is usually not - and vice versa - in a society where politics was less symbolic and much more rooted on individual personalities and talents than it was moving to be later on, but I don't have the transitional knowledge to back that up as my focus area obviously trickles off after the early-moderns pretty abruptly; I find the Wars of Religion a headache. XD)
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Date: 2022-06-18 07:40 pm (UTC)So hilariously through most of my period consummation was actually much less important for the "realness" of the marriage. That was something that became more important again after the Reformation, because the Protestants de-sacralized marriage and even though the Catholics didn't, there was a significant knock-on effect that got more intense as time went on, getting into the stuff you're familiar with.
The theological rule for marriage in my period was: you were married if you said you were married in "words of the present tense" (eg "I marry you" or "I do" in response to the "do you"), or if you said you'd GET married in words of the FUTURE tense and then had sex (so yes: boys who got girls to sleep with them on the basis of "I'll totally marry you later" were absolutely dragged in front of canon courts to discover hahaha ACTUALLY, bro, you ARE married now already).
This was a hard line; your only way out of it in terms of "annulled for non-consummation" was in fact if one party (usually the man) had DECEIVED the other party about whether he was CAPABLE of consummating. So eg if a woman found out that her husband was impotent and he'd KNOWN (or should have known) that he was impotent before they married, then the marriage could be annulled.
There were detailed examinations for this by "knowledgeable women of the village". (So a dude couldn't get OUT of a marriage free and clear by lying ABOUT this just because he didn't want to sleep with his wife.) Which yes does in fact mean that there are court cases where as far as we know two or three village matrons took a guy into another room to determine whether or not he could get it up via a handjob in order to determine whether a marriage could be annulled, because the mediaevals are WONDERFUL like that.
On the other hand if he became impotent after the marriage or didn't know or hadn't known, nope!
Otherwise, if you said "I do" and there was no destructive impediment (ie thing that made marriage theologically impossible regardless of anything else), you were married. End of story. The sacrament had been performed, the union was complete in God's eyes, that's it!
The Church had to work for a few centuries to ESTABLISH this, mind, and as I said it fell apart come the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and also obviously the powerful did their best to ignore it or get the Pope to magically annul things based on impediments they either made up, or which should have made the marriage impossible AND other FUTURE marriages impossible, but who cares I'm the King (looking at you Eleanor and Henry . . . )whenever they could! But the other flipside was the obsession with the Witnessed Consummation was a later thing that came back in AFTER the Reformation thanks to the effect that Protestant desacralization of marriage had on the entire affair, and attendant theological confusion, especially when countries were switching back and forth on what they were every ten years or so.
Shakespeare's era would have been at the wobbly point in time for this one, but still solidly erring on the side of, even the nobility were mostly reserving their daughters until at least late teenagerhood if not beyond, or if they surrendered them were doing so with retinues and support staff.
And again: outliers definitely happened! But there's a difference as we know bob between the outliers and the norms. (I have some speculation about the changing role of women OVERALL also having an effect on how willing the bride's family were to have younger women in the diplomatic role - there's also a strong indication a lot of the time in my period that they also tended not to be interested in sending the daughter out to the husband until she was old enough to be a USEFUL driver of their dynasty's interests, which a 14 year old is usually not - and vice versa - in a society where politics was less symbolic and much more rooted on individual personalities and talents than it was moving to be later on, but I don't have the transitional knowledge to back that up as my focus area obviously trickles off after the early-moderns pretty abruptly; I find the Wars of Religion a headache. XD)