Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of History
Sex Outside of Marriage in the Middle Ages: Having Your Cake And Eating It Too
On the Margins of Marriage: Concubinage and Illegitimacy in the Late Medieval Mediterranean is a study of informal domestic unions, illicit marriages, and illegitimate children. It explores the spectrum of marriage that existed in the late medieval Mediterranean among the peasantry and then the patrician class in the cities of Barcelona, Girona, Marseille, Perpignan, Venice, Pisa, and Lucca as the focal points of a comparative study to highlight the similarities and differences in both the western and eastern Mediterranean and then draw broad distinctions with this practice in England and Continental Europe. My project establishes the prevalence of concubinage as a Mediterranean cultural custom and makes the case that more women ended up in an informal union, by choice or by circumstances, than marriage and that historians must reconsider the primacy we give to marriage in the lives of late medieval people. It examines why an informal union offered men and women social and economic advantages, including how it affected the masculinity of men and highlights the empowerment of lower-level women to make decisions to marry or abandon a spouse. I further demonstrate that the experience of illegitimacy was so commonplace that it challenges scholarly assertions about the social stigma of bastardy in medieval society.