Unwanted Husbands and Adultery : Medieval Marriage in the Twelfth-Century Tristan and Isolde Legend

Abstract

This thesis discusses the evidence provided by late twelfth-century and early thirteenth-century romances on medieval marriage. During the twelfth century marriage was a much debated topic in the medieval Church, which was making great efforts to bring the institution of marriage under its jurisdiction. It was thus a time when the marriage philosophy was being molded to correspond to both lay and ecclesiastical ideology. The three case studies focus on Chrétien de Troyes’ Cliges, ’s Tristran and Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan. Even if these romances cannot be considered directly descriptive of the society they were written in, they show what medieval people thought about marriage and what values were directly associated with it in the turn of the twelfth century