Before Europe converted to Christianity, marriage was by raptus, by “taking.” A man strong enough to take a woman took her. Marriage was the last area of culture the Church finally managed to convert people on—by the 1100s the idea that a woman could not be given to a man against her consent was finally accepted.
People on FR complain a lot about the way Muslim cultures treat women as pawns. Well, it was a lot like that in ancient Germanic cultures before they became Christian.
Women were far more protected in property rites and economic endeavors in medieval Catholic Europe than they were under early modern absolutist governments where they were once more reduced to the status of children in many ways. Protestantism denied that marriage was a sacrament, which inevitably pushed them to accept divorce, supposedly only in extreme cases (just like Obama will only tax “the rich”) but it gradually became more widespread esp. as Protestantism liberalized into secularism. Women are once again the chief victims.
By insisting that women were free to accept or reject marriage arrangements made by their families, free to enter religious orders, where they had “career” managing large institutions, Catholicism opened up space for women unheard of in ancient Rome or the ancient Germanic cultures or in present-day Muslim cultures.
And our culture has lowered the status of women. Yes, they are in the boardrooms and universities etc. now. But casual sex (and women’s buying into casual [contraceptive] sex, which leads to greater divorce and single mothers fatherless children and all those pathologies) has made women more vulnerable and abused than they have been at any time since Europe became Catholic in the 500s-1000s.
Read Regine Pernoud, _Women in the Age of the Cathedrals_ for detailed comparisons of the legal and cultural status of women in the Catholic Middle Ages compared to early modern times.
A lot of people don't realize that this is where the tradition of carrying a bride across the threshold comes from.
Excellent argument!