ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

Sexuality, Marriage, and Informal Unions: The Experiences of Catalan Peasant Women

When considering the lives of peasant women, the prevalent view that chastity and sexual honor determined a woman’s worth and marriageability in medieval society needs to be reconsidered.  Fourteenth-century visitation records from Catalunya reveal that a significant number of peasant women not only engaged in premarital sex and had multiple sex partners in a lifetime, but also moved in and out of formal and informal unions.  Indeed, a woman could enter into a concubinous relationship with one man before entering into marriage with another without being condemned as a “whore” by fellow villagers.  Betrothed women who had sexual intercourse but then did not marry were still able to contract other marriages.  And a surprisingly number of women practiced self-divorce and formed new unions with a priest or layman. Following the work of Allyson Poska, this paper argues that peasant women had more opportunities to make decisions about their sexual relationships, marriage, and divorce than women from the nobility and the middling ranks of urban society.  It also explores whether marriage offered peasant women more protection than an informal union.  Taking into account that both men and women practiced self-divorce and did not have sufficient funds to annul or enforce their marriages in church courts, marriage was not a promise of economic security for peasant women.  In short, we cannot assume that marriage benefitted women across the full spectrum of medieval society.