Loving, Honoring, and Obeying

The book we read for this week, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico by Patricia Seed, pretty much blew away the majority of my preconceived notions about marriage in colonial Mexican society (to the extent that I had any!).  Seed argues that until the late 17th century, marrying for love was the norm, and a norm protected vigorously by the Catholic Church.  Seed’s book basically revealed to me that I had previously thought that people started marrying for love around about 1960.

Her argument centers around the changing conception of marriage following the Reformation in Europe in the 16th century.  Marriage became, countering Luther’s doctrine that marriage was a civil affair, a holy sacrament.  This meant that it had to be entered into freely, or it was worthless.  The Church, then, had to defend marrying for love from parents/guardians who wanted marriage for gain.  And it remained that way for several hundred years.  What happened was that the world changed around the Church, and its ideas about marriage became antiquated and out of step.  Marriage became again about social gain (at least for those who had anything to gain or lose).  What Seed says happens is the birth of capitalism.  As wealth for some increased, maintaining it became ever important.  Cultural values around what gave people status changed (wealth and class status replaced virtue as the source of social standing).  Marriage for love, without thought to the social consequences, became anathema.  Parents went out of their way to make sure their children married the partner whose status/wealth matched/exceeded their own; and the Church became less able and less willing to do anything about it.

The bulk of Seed’s evidence comes from reading the cases of marriage disputes (where someone wishes to prevent another person from marrying) for the entirety of the colonial period in Mexico.  What she learns is that the arguments that successfully prevent marriage changed.  They started out being only things like too close relations, previous promises to marry, etc.  Arguments like “they’re too poor” didn’t cut it.  Eventually, however, challenges based on unequal social status (wealth, race) started to work.  The actions taken by the Church to ensure marriages were free, and not coerced, changed as well.  The Church, for a period of time, would perform secret marriages and offer protective custody.  These practices became rarer and rarer even though the Church’s rhetoric stayed the same.

Seed’s approach included not only the aforementioned analysis of archival records, but also close readings of popular literature in Spain and religious texts about marriage put out by the Church.  This approach enabled her to not only analize actual practice, but also to give the reader a sense of where the culture was at and what the rhetoric of the Church was.  The discrepancies are quite interesting.