Ruth Mazo Karras

In Unmarriages, Ruth Mazo Karras explores long-term, opposite-sex monogamous sexual relationships which were either not considered marriages by medieval society or were disputed unions. She grounds her study in the three main influences on medieval marriage law/custom: Roman law, scripture, and Germanic tradition, and then moves on to a series of case studies. Karras deftly lays out how fuzzy, ambiguous, and contested the nature of a relationship could be in the Middle Ages—something perhaps doubly surprising to the modern reader, accustomed to think of legal marriage as a binary state ("are" or "are not"), and of medieval sexual relationships as "traditional", rigorously defined and policed. Medievalists won't necessarily find much that's fresh here in terms of the sourcebase used (apart from some unpublished Paris archdeaconry court records), but Karras does an unsurprisingly excellent job at marshalling those sources to make a clear and cogent argument.… (more)

A pretty definitive account of prostitution in medieval England, Karras does a good job of articulating the medieval concept of prostitution—where what made you a 'whore' was not so much that you took money in return for sex, but the very fact that you were (seen as) sexually available—while treading a careful path between seeing these women as solely victims of the society in which they lived, and seeing them as in control of their own destiny. There were one or two small points to nitpick at—while I am sure that a man's sexual activities were not as overwhelmingly defining of their identities as women's were, I don't think that their behaviour was entirely irrelevant either. Despite those quibbles, this is I think the book to turn to if you have an interest in the subject.… (more)