Week 7 Post-History 465

This week we looked at the Patricia Seed book, “To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico”, which was a pretty in depth and detailed analysis of a period of about three centuries. It was nice to have the opportunity to read a longer, full length argument in which the author took several hundred pages to develop and support her argument. She uses an unbelievable amount of sources, covering almost 50 pages with just citations. Overall, I thought it was a pretty good analysis of the social morphology surrounding marriage dynamics from the 16th to 18th centuries.

The basic argument centered around the idea that changes in the social structure/common thought resulted in new and different views towards marriage. The book was organized in such a way as to present ideas about love, will, honor, and the church in the 16th century and then to explain how and why those ideas changed through time. Furthermore, it related the changing perceptions and roles of those things to changing attitudes towards marriage. One thing my group talked extensively about last Thursday was the earlier perceptions of love. It was interesting that early Spanish society “…condemned marriage for economic, political, or social gain” (53). It seems that throughout the majority of history in most cultures the purpose of marriage was for reasons other than modern ideas of love, yet by this time in Spanish society the idea of love was dominant in relationships, and even protected by the church. This seems farfetched initially, but when considered alongside this society’s preoccupation with “will” and the protection of it in religious sacraments, it makes sense. Seed explains that, “This organizational need to stress free will produced a renewed Catholic emphasis on the necessity of the parties’ freely given consent to a marriage” (33). It is interesting that the Church would intervene on the part of the children in protection from the parents, an idea that seems very modern.

What I found even more shocking, however, was that this freedom evaporated as time went on, and as the Church weakened. I feel like movements towards less Church control are often related with more freedom, but this book demonstrated that as the Church lost control of the royal police, and became seemingly more irrelevant, young adults actually lost rights to marry, and were more subservient to the wishes of their parents. It was interesting to read the extent to which some parents would go to prevent marriages, even exiling their kids. As the Church became less involved in the private affairs of peoples lives, rights of the younger generation were actually lost, and parents had more control over their kids. This seems anti-progressive in modern concepts of rights, but it seems to simply be the result of changing dynamics regarding the role of religion in people’s personal decisions. I enjoyed Seed’s perspective on how these changing dynamics affected marriages, and it provides good insight into not only the social and gender relations in Spain, but also in Early Latin America, in which Spain had a very strong presence.