The Knight, the Woman, and the Priest. The History of Marriage in Medieval France

The book by Georges Duby is dedicated to the study of the institution of marriage — the "keystone" of the entire social structure of a society commonly referred to as feudal. Throughout the 10th to 13th centuries, marriage was the arena for ideological battles between the ancestral rights of the nobility and the primacy of the Church. This was a conflict between two spheres to which marriage belongs: the secular and the religious. Relying on unique sources — ecclesiastical decrees, hagiographies, family chronicles, and even courtly literature — Duby shows how slowly and painfully the transformation of marriage from a secular contract into a religious sacrament took place, and provides insight into the everyday life of feudal society. Georges Duby (1919–1996) was a historian specializing in the Middle Ages, one of the principal representatives of the "Annales" School. The focus of his research has always been on the social aspects of feudal society and the person of the Middle Ages, their corporeality, aesthetic representations, and preferences.