Conclusions

Gratian composed his Decretum at a time when the Church’s law of marriage and sexual offenses was undergoing considerable change. Two quite different theories about the formation of marriage were current when he wrote, and, characteristically, he attempted to reconcile them and to produce his own mar­riage theory, which combined elements of both schools.

Gratians treatment of divorce and remarriage reflects these uncertainties in contemporary thought.^[1033] His discussion of clandestine marriage likewise re­flects the uncertainties of his generation about the nature of marriage as a pub­lic institution. Should some sort of public ceremony be required as an essential condition of marriage? Or was marriage primarily a private agreement between the parties, in which case it would be inconsistent to require public rituals? Gratian was apparently undecided on these issues, although his sympathies leaned in the direction of considering marriage an essentially private affair.^[1034] While Gratian accepted the rules that barred marriages between persons re­lated within seven degrees of consanguinity, he was surely not unaware of the potential problems that those rules posed, since few marriages can have been entirely immune from attack under the seven-degree rule.^[1035] All of these issues

Conclusions

impinged on family structure, which itself was undergoing important changes in Catholic Europe during Gratian’s generation.^[1036]

The Decretum outlined a scheme of sexual morality that was disciplined and austere, grounded on the premise that sex was licit only within marriage, and then primarily for procreation, never for sheer pleasure.

Women in twelfth-century society were far more circumscribed in their sex lives than were men and this was probably true at all levels of the social hierar­chy. “The woman has no power,” Gratian declared at one point, “but in every­thing she is subject to the control of her husband.”^[1038] Here Gratian described quite accurately the realities of his time for the great majority of women, save perhaps for a small handful of those among the highest nobility and royalty.^[1039] To this broad generalization, however, Gratian admitted two important excep­tions: so far as sexual rights within marriage were concerned, women, he taught, had absolute equality with men. The sex life of the married couple was, or ought to be, an island of comparative privacy where equal rights prevailed, within a larger society where womens rights were severely curtailed. And men and women were equal so far as the law was concerned when it came to sex crimes, particularly adultery. Again, however, it remained for Gratians suc­cessors to contrive mechanisms to secure effective implementation of the lim­ited equality that he believed women were entitled to.