The Effect of Alexander III’s ‘Rules on the Formation of Marriage’ in Angevin England (R. Allen Brown Memorial Lecture)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a splendid but controversial paper read at the Fourth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law in Toronto in 1972, Charles Donahue presented the arresting argument that Pope Alexander III (1159–81) pursued a consistent policy in his judgments and consultations relating to matrimony, intended to undermine the prevailing structures supporting seigneurial and paternal control of marriage. ‘Alexander’s rules on the formation of marriage’, he wrote, ‘constitute a conscious, and at least partially successful, attempt to use the canon law to influence the course of social development.’ Further, he argued that the ‘rules’ were new, that they did diminish the influence of family and feudal lords on the choice of marriage partners, and that ‘the rules were adopted, at least partially, in order to achieve that effect.’ This broad and bold thesis was endorsed fifteen years later in 1987, in James Brundage’s major study on Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe , which concluded, even more emphatically, that ‘[Alexander] clearly wished to recast the law of family relationships…. He consistently sought to free marriages from the control of parents, families, and feudal overlords and [to] place the choice of marriage partners under the exclusive control of the parties themselves.’ For both scholars, Alexander’s ‘policy’ was profoundly revolutionary. And so it would have been, had such a policy existed. To someone with even a passing knowledge of ‘the law and custom of the English realm’, to use Glanvill’s oft-repeated phrase, these confident assertions are hard to square with the evidence. The problem with the thesis is that it depended not on an examination of immediate historical circumstances, of which Professor Donahue was not unaware, but on matrimonial cases from English ecclesiastical courts recorded over a hundred or even two hundred years after Alexander’s death. These reveal a preponderance of cases relating to ‘informal marriages’, and a corresponding willingness to recognize the validity of such marriages, if they could be proved; he interpreted both findings as direct and intended consequences of ‘the Alexandrine rules’, despite the time lapse and a frank acknowledgement that ‘the barriers of evidence are most formidable to establish the proposition’.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".