Seed- Transforming Marriages

First off, I was blown away by the depth that Seed went into to portray this transformation of marriage in Spanish society. She studied over 16,000 cases if you didn’t remember this from our class discussion, and this makes her argument quite compelling! I think you have to be pretty passionate about something to put such effort into things, but regardless, this book contextualizes terms in a historical manner and uses anecdotes that really emphasize the topic of marriage through the almost 300 years Seed covers!

Clearly, the book is split into chronological arrangement, beginning with early 16th century Spain and bringing readers through up to the 19th century. Context-wise it was very interesting to read about how marriage was considered a sacrament in early Spain and evolved into “love” over the years. What is really interesting was when marriage was considered a sacrament, the Catholic Church  seemed to have much more authority and control over marriages and what it consisted of between men and women. So, if a child was not permitted marriage by his or her parents, he or she could protest to the church, permitting more autonomy to choice of marriage. However, as marriage shifted towards love, this was also when property and land-ownership was increasingly becoming important, thus, the Catholic Church was still present, but parents seemed to have much more authority and control due to the role that property played into marriages. Seed really talks about the authority of fathers and how social status through land ownership allowed the family to have more sayso in a child’s marriage because this directly affected the inheritances of families.

Love was not the only evolving aspect, as Seed discusses, but as her title suggests, “honor” changed too. Early on, and we even discussed this in class on numerous occasions, female chastity and male virility were to be honored and protected in early Spain, albeit on a prescriptive level as we all know that actual practices of people were not as “ideal” as the church would like. (I don’t think times have changed much in our “ideals” v. practices, do you?) But back to the main point, honor shifted more towards social status and again, property ownership. Can we all see an overwhelming theme? Capitalism and land ownership really changed society, as we originally saw when the Spanish took over Indigenous and African lifestyle.

Seed’s book  portrays exceptionally well how honor shifted towards social status and patriarchy became much stronger, and marriages during this time reflected this transformation. In our small groups on Thursday, my group happened to talk about what life must have been for children during this time, and I can’t say that I’m too upset I wasn’t around to experience not being able to choose a marriage partner based on inheritance and property ownership. Of course, then, for women especially, I guess marriage or entering the Church was your only route to having a life/social status, so maybe being married off to enhance your family’s status wasn’t all that bad. I’m a little biased, as we can tell….Seed’s book, nonetheless, was eye-opening, and 16,000 cases for reference sure makes it convincing.