Conclusions

The twelfth century has been called the century of love, because of the celebra­tion of love in the poetry of the period.^[1260] The decretists who wrote in the sec­ond half of the century were probably not Unafiected by contemporary beliefs and attitudes, and commentaries on the law of marriage may well reflect the influence of ideas about individualism and personal emotions current in the literature of the period.

Positive valuations of love, marriage, and sexuality, however, were by no means universal or even common among canonists in this period. Huguccio, the most influential of them all, took an exceedingly dim view of sexual grati­fication, even in a loving and procreative matrimonial union. The differences among the decretists were most striking when they dealt with the role of sex in the formation of marriage itself. The conflict of opinion between the School of Bologna and the School of Paris on the question of whether carnal copulation was essential to create a marriage reflected the uncertainties that late twelfth­century canonists felt about the legitimacy of any kind of sexual expression. French canonists might have been expected to grant marital sexuality a more prominent place in their treatment of marriage than did their colleagues at Bo­logna, since the French school had adopted a definition of marriage that placed great emphasis upon the affective and personal element of consent. Yet, this failed to occur, and the most intransigent rigorists among the canonists of this age belonged to the French tradition.

Decretist treatments both of marital and nonmarital sex were also influ­enced, albeit unevenly, by the development during this period of new concepts of nature. While philosophers and theologians saw nature as a liberalizing and expansive notion, the jurists employed nature, at least in regard to sex, as a restrictive principle. While twelfth-century philosophers were beginning to in­voke nature as a basic cosmological principle, the canonists of the period seem to have found the concept of nature, on the whole, merely confusing.^[1264] Their confusion was reflected in their treatment of such matters as unusual coital positions and extravaginal intercourse in marriage, homosexuality, and other deviations from common sexual practices. This confusion, as we shall see, be­came even more pronounced among later generations of canonists.

Finally, the decretists’ prejudices about women and beliefs about the nature of reproductive biology profoundly conditioned their treatment of sex and mar­riage.^[1265] Notions about female docility, the character and force of the female sex drive, and the natural inconstancy and intellectual inferiority of women, coupled with the clerical elite’s extraordinary reverence for virginity, underlay much de- cretist writing about the law of marriage and sexual relations.