Power, Marriage, and Canon Law
"Power Over the Body, Equality in the Family: Rights and Domestic Relations in Medieval Canon Law"
Charles J. Reid Jr., POWER OVER THE BODY, EQUALITY IN THE
FAMILY: RIGHTS AND DOMESTIC RELATIONS IN MEDIEVAL CANON
LAW, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004
BY: CHARLES J. REID
University of St. Thomas, St. Paul/Minneapolis, MN
- School of Law
Paper ID: U fo St. Thomas Legal Studies Research Paper No. 05-08
Contact: CHARLES J. REID
Email: Mailto:cjreid@stthomas.edu
Postal: University of St. Thomas, St. Paul/Minneapolis, MN - School
of Law
1000 La Salle Avenue
Minneapolis, MN 55403-2005 UNITED STATES
ABSTRACT:
The modern secular view of marriage as resting principally on the continuing affection and consent of both parties is a particular manifestation of a kind of philosophical liberalism that sees the marital relationship merely as an aggregation of individual interests and expressed in terms of rights. This secularized, highly individualistic view of marriage and the family and the rights of parties within those relationships has had an enormous impact on the shape of the American law of domestic relations over the last several decades.
However, this secularist viewpoint clashes with other strongly held and popular beliefs about marital relationships and especially with our instinctive sense that marriage should be about community formation: the parties to a marriage should not be pursuing purely egoistic interests, but should be engaged in meeting one another’s needs and providing for the upbringing of their offspring. Today, a renewed focus on marital obligation is a necessary antidote to threatening trends in popular as well as legal culture.
In this book, Dr. Reid demonstrates that many elements of the traditional understanding of marriage developed from concepts about rights and corresponding responsibilities that began to take shape in twelfth-century scholastic jurisprudence. American judges and lawyers over the past two centuries were hardly the first to speak in a vocabulary of conjugal rights or duties arising from natural obligations. These understandings have deep roots in Western notions of marital relations. Dr. Reid explores the historical foundations of this alternative way of thinking and speaking about the marital relationship and explains how a language of rights came to be grafted, at a very early date in Western history, onto the idea of marriage.
In the medieval period, marriage was understood as having a certain natural structure that neither the parties themselves, nor even the church, were free to alter. Marriage was ordered to the good of both spouses and the procreation and upbringing of children. Within this ordered structure, the canonist scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries recognized the existence of certain rights and obligations in order to ensure that the basic goods and goals of marriage were fulfilled. Through the historical developments explained in this book, a new picture of the law governing the marital relationship, from its historical origins in the medieval period, emerges.
Charles J. Reid Jr., POWER OVER THE BODY, EQUALITY IN THE
FAMILY: RIGHTS AND DOMESTIC RELATIONS IN MEDIEVAL CANON
LAW, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004
BY: CHARLES J. REID
University of St. Thomas, St. Paul/Minneapolis, MN
- School of Law
Paper ID: U fo St. Thomas Legal Studies Research Paper No. 05-08
Contact: CHARLES J. REID
Email: Mailto:cjreid@stthomas.edu
Postal: University of St. Thomas, St. Paul/Minneapolis, MN - School
of Law
1000 La Salle Avenue
Minneapolis, MN 55403-2005 UNITED STATES
ABSTRACT:
The modern secular view of marriage as resting principally on the continuing affection and consent of both parties is a particular manifestation of a kind of philosophical liberalism that sees the marital relationship merely as an aggregation of individual interests and expressed in terms of rights. This secularized, highly individualistic view of marriage and the family and the rights of parties within those relationships has had an enormous impact on the shape of the American law of domestic relations over the last several decades.
However, this secularist viewpoint clashes with other strongly held and popular beliefs about marital relationships and especially with our instinctive sense that marriage should be about community formation: the parties to a marriage should not be pursuing purely egoistic interests, but should be engaged in meeting one another’s needs and providing for the upbringing of their offspring. Today, a renewed focus on marital obligation is a necessary antidote to threatening trends in popular as well as legal culture.
In this book, Dr. Reid demonstrates that many elements of the traditional understanding of marriage developed from concepts about rights and corresponding responsibilities that began to take shape in twelfth-century scholastic jurisprudence. American judges and lawyers over the past two centuries were hardly the first to speak in a vocabulary of conjugal rights or duties arising from natural obligations. These understandings have deep roots in Western notions of marital relations. Dr. Reid explores the historical foundations of this alternative way of thinking and speaking about the marital relationship and explains how a language of rights came to be grafted, at a very early date in Western history, onto the idea of marriage.
In the medieval period, marriage was understood as having a certain natural structure that neither the parties themselves, nor even the church, were free to alter. Marriage was ordered to the good of both spouses and the procreation and upbringing of children. Within this ordered structure, the canonist scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries recognized the existence of certain rights and obligations in order to ensure that the basic goods and goals of marriage were fulfilled. Through the historical developments explained in this book, a new picture of the law governing the marital relationship, from its historical origins in the medieval period, emerges.
Posted by Andy Morriss on
Thursday November 10, 2005 at 8:27am