Her death in the spring of 1380 did nothing to shake this conviction. Catherine’s emaciated body, witness as it was to her spectacular feats of fasting, served as a salutary reminder to the pope and his court of what the Church itself should properly be. Not merely a virgin, she had been a bride. As a young girl pledging herself to Christ, she had defied her parents’ plans to marry her by hacking off all her hair. She was, so she had told them, already betrothed. Their fury and consternation could not make her change her mind. Sure enough, in 1367, when she was twenty years old, and Siena was celebrating the end of carnival, her reward had arrived. In the small room in her parents’ house where she would fast, and meditate, and pray, Christ had come to her. The Virgin and various saints, Paul and Dominic included, had served as witnesses. King David had played his harp. The wedding ring was Christ’s own foreskin, removed when he had been circumcised as a child, and still wet with his holy blood.* Invisible though it was to others, Catherine had worn it from that moment on. Intimacy of this order with the divine was beyond the reach of any man. True, there were some who mocked Catherine’s claims. In Avignon, when she went into one of her states of ecstasy, a cardinal’s mistress had pricked her foot with a pin to see if she was faking. Gregory XI and Urban VI, though, had both known better than to doubt. They understood the mystery revealed to them by Catherine. The Church, too, was a bride of Christ. ‘Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.’ So a letter attributed to Paul, and included in the canon of scripture, had instructed. ‘For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Saviour.’21 In Catherine’s devotion to her Lord – a devotion that she had not hesitated to define in burning and exultant tones as desire – was both a reproach and an inspiration to all the Church.
Here, in this sacral understanding of marriage, was another marker of the revolution that Christianity had brought to the erotic. The insistence of scripture that a man and a woman, whenever they took to the marital bed, were joined as Christ and his Church were joined, becoming one flesh, gave to both a rare dignity. If the wife was instructed to submit to her husband, then so equally was the husband instructed to be faithful to his wife. Here, by the standards of the age into which Christianity had been born, was an obligation that demanded an almost heroic degree of self-denial. That Roman law – unlike the Talmud, and unlike the customs of most other ancient peoples – defined marriage as a monogamous institution had not for a moment meant that it required men to display life-long fidelity. Husbands had enjoyed a legal right to divorce – and, of course, to forcing themselves on their inferiors – pretty much as they pleased. This was why, in its long and arduous struggle to trammel the sexual appetites of Christians, the Church had made marriage the particular focus of its attentions. The double standards that for so long had been a feature of marital ethics had come to be sternly patrolled. Joined together under the watchful eye of Christ, men were commanded to be as faithful to their wives as their wives were to them. Divorce – except in the very rarest of circumstances – was prohibited. To cast off a wife was to ‘render her an adulteress’.22 So Jesus himself had declared. The bonds of a Christian marriage, mutual and indissoluble as they were, served to join man and woman together as they had never been joined before.
Christ, placing his ring on Catherine’s finger, had defined salvation as an ‘everlasting wedding-feast in heaven’.23 That marriage was a sacrament, a visible symbol of God’s grace, was a doctrine that it had taken the Church many centuries to bring Christians to accept. The assumption that marriage existed to cement alliances between two families – an assumption as universal as it was primordial – had not easily been undermined. Only once the great apparatus of canon law was in place had the Church at last been in a position to bring the institution firmly under its control. Catherine, refusing her parents’ demands that she marry their choice of husband, insisting that she was pledged to another man, had been entirely within her rights as a Christian. No couple could be forced into a betrothal, nor into wedlock, nor into a physical coupling. Priests were authorised to join couples without the knowledge of their parents – or even their permission. It was consent, not coercion, that constituted the only proper foundation of a marriage. The Church, by pledging itself to this conviction, and putting it into law, was treading on the toes of patriarchs everywhere. Here was a development pregnant with implications for the future. Opening up before the Christian people was the path to a radical new conception of marriage: one founded on mutual attraction, on love. Inexorably, the rights of the individual were coming to trump those of family. God’s authority was being identified, not with the venerable authority of a father to impose his will on his children, but with an altogether more subversive principle: freedom of choice.
So strange was the Christian conception of marriage that it had always raised eyebrows in the lands beyond Christendom. From the very earliest days of Islamic scholarship, Muslims – whose licence to enjoy a variety of wives and slaves was sanctioned directly by the Qur’an itself – had viewed the Church’s insistence on monogamy with amused bewilderment. Yet Christians, far from feeling nonplussed by such contempt, had only been confirmed in their determination to bring proper order to pagan appetites. Saint Boniface, acknowledging the appeal of polygamy to fallen man, had shuddered in revulsion at the bestiality it represented: ‘a base defilement of everything, as though it were whinnying horses or braying asses mixing it up with their adulterous lusts’.24 His disgust, at the entanglement of limbs that should never have been permitted to intertwine, at the joining of flesh that should for ever have been kept apart, had run very deep. Most repellent of all, a constant menace among those ignorant of Christ’s love and of his laws, was the proclivity for incest. Again and again, writing to Rome, Boniface had demanded reassurance on a particularly pressing point: the degree of relationship within which a couple might legitimately be permitted to marry. The pope, in his replies, had made a great show of liberality. ‘Since moderation is better than strictness of discipline, especially toward so uncivilised a people, they may contract marriage after the fourth degree.’25 Almost half a millennium on, and the canons of the great council summoned by Innocent III to the Lateran had ordained the same. This as well had been advertised as a liberalising measure. After all, as a canon of the council served notice, the degrees within which marriages were forbidden had for a long while been seven.
Of all the measures taken by the Church to shape and mould the Christian people, few were to prove more enduring in their consequences. Back in ancient times, when the statue of Venus retrieved from a building site in Siena had been worshipped as a portrait of a living goddess, the word familia had signified a vast and sprawling household. Clans, dependents, slaves: all were family. But that had changed. The Church, in its determination to place married couples, and not ambitious patriarchs, at the heart of a properly Christian society had tamed the instinct of grasping dynasts to pair off cousins with cousins. Only relationships sanctioned by canons were classed as legitimate. No families were permitted to be joined in marriage except for those licensed by the Church: ‘in-laws’. The hold of clans, as a result, had begun to slip. Ties between kin had progressively weakened. Households had shrunk. The fabric of Christendom had come to possess a thoroughly distinctive weave.