The Voices of Nîmes: Women, Sex, and Marriage in Reformation Languedoc by Lipscomb Suzannah;

Author:Lipscomb, Suzannah; [Lipscomb, Suzannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2018-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

Gifts and Rituals

Marriage was a contract, expressed both by the verbal exchange that affianced or wed a couple, and by an accompanying document drawn up by a notary. A written contract survives between Jean Combes and Suzanne Rouyere from Nîmes, dating from 10 January 1615, and gives an example of what pertained to the record of a marriage.15 Theirs was a contract of betrothal: it notes that promises to marry had been made in ‘words of the future [tense], to be accomplished if it pleases God’. It was drawn up ‘in the name of God’, and gave the purposes of marriage to be ‘to the praise of God’ and the ‘multiplication of human lineage’. Jean Combes was identified as the legitimate son of Claude Combes and Margueritte Gaye, both inhabitants of Nîmes, and Suzanne Rouyere as the ‘honest daughter’ of the late Anthoine Rouyere and Anne Audrigue, also of Nîmes. These appellations are pertinent: the most important criterion for a man was his legitimacy, conveying that he could transmit the blood line of his family; for a woman, it was her honesty—her chastity—ensuring that children born into the marriage would be true heirs of her husband. These labels therefore reaffirm the central purpose of marriage, under law, of safeguarding lineage. The contract then noted the mutual consent of the couple and their intention to solemnize their marriage in the Reformed Christian church. It required banns to be published ‘following the ordinance of the king’, then noted that it was witnessed by the couple, Jean’s parents, and Suzanne’s mother and her brother, who was their late father’s heir. Her brother’s role was chiefly financial: as the inheritor of his father’s estate, it fell to him to supply his sister with a dowry of sufficient stature.

The contract was the written confirmation of the interchange of words by which a marriage was promised or occurred. This verbal exchange in which a couple promised to marry each other was known as the donation de corps—the ‘giving of bodies’. The descriptions of this indicate that the traditional formulation did not require the couple to say, ‘I take you as my husband/wife’. Instead, they were asked ‘do you give your body to X?’. In Languedoc, marriage was linguistically the gift of two people to each other physically, emotionally, and materially, not the acquisition of another.16 Much of the popular rite and ritual surrounding betrothal extended this concept of mutual giving, and these attendant customs came for many to signify and validate a marriage in a way that the Reformed Church’s new, more regulated version could not.

In Montauban in 1596 objections were raised to the marriage of Jean Pelissie and Susanne de Vernhiol by Pellisie’s stepmother, godmother, and his godmother’s sister and husband. Even though the marriage had already been contracted, they protested that it had been done without their knowledge or consent, and that Pelissie had a prior commitment to another woman, Naude Gabrielle. Gabrielle described the circumstances of Pelissie’s proposal to her and their engagement,

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