A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [35]
The most imaginative cluster of fables appeared in print the year after the Piper’s mass murders, when William Caxton published Sir Thomas Malory’s Le morte d’Arthur. Later, bowdlerized versions of this great work have obscured the fact that Malory, contemplating medieval morality, seldom wore blinders. He had no illusions about his heroine when he wrote: “There syr Launcelot toke the Fayrest Ladie by the hand, and she was naked as a nedel.” Some of his characters may actually have existed. For over a thousand years villagers in remote parts of Wales have called an adulteress “a regular Guinevere.” But Launcelot du Lac is entirely fictitious, and given the colossal time sprawl of the Middle Ages, it is highly unlikely that Guinevere, if indeed she lived, even shared the same century with Arthur.
WE KNOW LITTLE of the circumstances under which Magellan and his Beatriz were married in 1517, but if they were united by transcendental love, they were an odd couple. It is true that a young archduke in Vienna’s imperial court had introduced the diamond ring as a sign of engagement forty years earlier, but its vogue had been confined to the patriciate, and even there it had found little favor. Typically, news of an imminent marriage spread when the pregnancy of the bride-elect began to show. If she had been particularly user-friendly, raising genuine doubts about the child’s paternity, those who had enjoyed her favors drew straws. “Virginity,” one historian of the period writes, “had to be protected by every device of custom, morals, law, religion, paternal authority, pedagogy, and ‘point of honor’; yet somehow it managed to get lost.”
No one was actually scandalized; the normal, eternal reproductive instincts were merely asserting themselves. But such random matrimony disappointed parents; a girl’s wedding was the pivotal event in her life, and its economic implications—the ceremony was among other things a merging of belongings—concerned both families. The tradition of arranged marriages, sensibly conceived, was obviously crumbling. Commentators of the time, believing that the old way was best, were troubled. In his Colloquia familiaria (Colloquies) Erasmus recommended that youths let fathers choose their brides and trust that love would grow as acquaintance ripened. Even Rabelais agreed in Le cinquiesme et dernier livre. Couples who kicked over the traces were reproached in The Schole-master by Roger Ascham, tutor to England’s royal family. Ascham bitterly regretted that “our time is so far gone from the old discipline and obedience as now not only young gentlemen but even very young girls dare … marry themselves in spite of father, mother, God, good order, and all.” At the University of Wittenberg, Martin Luther, dismayed that the son of a faculty colleague had plighted his troth without consulting his father—and that a young judge had found the vow legal—thought the reputation of the institution was being tarnished. He wrote: “Many parents have ordered their sons home … saying that we hang wives around their necks. … The next Sunday I preached a strong sermon, telling men to follow the common road and manner which had been since the beginning of the world … namely, that parents should give their children to each other with prudence and good will, without their own preliminary arrangement.”
Females could marry—legally, with or without parental consent—when they reached their twelfth birthday. The age for males was fourteen. Even before she had reached her teens, a girl knew that unless she married before she was twenty-one, society would consider her useless, fit only