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.³³ Grandes Chroniques de France, ed.Jules Viard (Paris: Société de l Histoire de France,1822), ii.53.I am grateful to Marigold Norbye for this reference.³t Airlie,  Private Bodies , 11.³u Aimoin of Fleury, Historia Francorum, 759 60; Fredegar, Fourth Book, 20 1.The Early Middle Ages 800 1100 39HINCMAR OF RHEIMS (2): IMPOTENCE MAGICAND MARRIAGE LAWIn the cases described above, it was not particularly important to distinguishimpotence magic clearly from love- or hate-magic.As long as it remainedrelatively easy for kings to repudiate wives who no longer suited theirpurposes, either kind of magic could explain this equally well.However, insituations where it was difficult to repudiate wives, it became useful to singleout impotence magic.This was because in both Roman and ecclesiasticallaw, impotence was recognized as a ground for annulling a marriage,³vbut other forms of bewitchment were not.In practice, kings continued torepudiate wives into the eleventh century,³w but sometimes assertive church-men might make difficulties for high-profile men who acted without regardfor the canon law of marriage, as they did in ninth-century Francia.³x It is inthis context that a medieval writer first singled out magically-causedimpotence as a topic worth discussing separately from other forms of lovemagic.It also comes as little surprise that the man to do this was that experton both magic and marriage law, Hincmar of Rheims.Hincmar singled out impotence magic when he discussed another casethat was also referred to him in 860.This case concerned an Aquitainiancount called Stephen, who was betrothed to the daughter of anotherAquitainian count, Raymond.Stephen was eager to break off the betrothalfor reasons that were probably political,³y but under pressure fromRaymond, he had gone through with the wedding ceremony.However,Stephen subsequently claimed that he had not consummated the marriagebecause he had previously slept with a relative of his fiancée, which incanon law would have rendered the marriage incestuous.Hincmarsupported Stephen, probably on the instructions of Charles the Bald whowas seeking Stephen s support at the time.t p He argued that since Stephenand Raymond s daughter could not consummate their marriage without³v Brundage, Law, 115, 144.³w Pauline Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers: the King s Wife in the EarlyMiddle Ages (London: Batsford Academic and Educational, 1983), 74.³x Ibid., 80.³y Janet L.Nelson, Charles the Bald (London: Longman, 1992), 185.t p Ibid., 196 7.40 The Early Middle Ages 800 1100committing incest, then the marriage was invalid.Hincmar backed this upwith the argument that if a marriage could not be consummated, then itwas incomplete because it could not symbolize the union of Christ withthe Church.Hincmar claimed that this view went back to Augustine, buthis source was in fact a letter of the fifth-century pope Leo I which hadbecome corrupted during its transmission.Hincmar thus became the firstclerical writer on marriage to state that an unconsummated marriage wasincomplete and therefore dissoluble under certain circumstances.t ¹Hincmar went on to argue that if Stephen could not legitimately havesex with Raymond s daughter, then he had a form of impotence.Then hediscussed magically-caused impotence as a subsection of this in a shortparagraph beginning with the words Si per sortiarias:If by sorceresses and [female] magicians, with the permission of the hidden butnever or nowhere unjust judgement of God, and through the working of theDevil, it happens [that a couple cannot have intercourse], [the couple] to whomthis happens should be encouraged to make a pure confession of all their sins toGod and a priest with a contrite heart and humble spirit.With many tears andvery generous almsgiving, and prayers and fasting, they should make satisfactionto the Lord, by whose judgement, at their own deserving and unwillingly, theyhave deserved to be deprived of that blessing which the Lord gave to our firstparents in paradise before sin; and even after sin he does not wish to deprive thewhole human race of it.The ministers of the church should attend to theirhealing in so far as God (who healed Abimelech and his house by the prayers ofAbraham) grants, through exorcisms and the other offices of ecclesiasticalmedicine.Those who by chance cannot be healed, can be separated; but after theyhave sought other marriages, while those to whom they are married are still living,they cannot be reconciled with their former partners whom they have left, even ifthe ability to have intercourse has returned to them.t ²t ¹ On this text see Jean Gaudemet,  Recherche sur les origines historiques de la faculté derompre le mariage non consommé , in Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress ofMedieval Canon Law, ed.Stephan Kuttner and Kenneth Pennington, Monumenta IurisCanonici C.6 (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1980), 316 18; GérardFransen,  La Lettre de Hincmar de Reims au Sujet du Mariage d Étienne , in R.Lievens, E.vanMingroot, and W.Verbeke (eds.), Pascua Mediaevalia: Studies voor Prof.J.M.de Smet(Louvain: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 1983), 133 46; Philip Lyndon Reynolds, Marriage inthe Western Church (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 353 61; and D.L.d Avray, Medieval Marriage:Symbolism and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 86 7, 176 9.t ²  Si per sortiarias atque maleficas occulto, sed numquam vel nusquam iniusto, Deiiudicio permittente et diabolo operante accidit, hortandi sunt quibus ista eveniunt, ut cordecontrito et spiritu humiliato Deo et sacerdoti de omnibus peccatis suis puram confessionemThe Early Middle Ages 800 1100 41Unlike Hincmar s treatise on the Divorce of Lothar and Theutberga, whichsurvives in only one manuscript t ³ and does not seem to have influencedlater discussions of impotence magic, Si per sortiarias was very widely read.Itwas excerpted and copied into later canon law collections, and became thesource of all subsequent canon law on magically-caused impotence.Laterwriters often singled out four main points for comment: firstly, the fact thatGod permits impotence magic; secondly, the female gender of the magician;thirdly, the ecclesiastical cures, which Hincmar had also mentioned inthe Divorce; and finally, and most important of all, the conclusion that ifecclesiastical cures failed, the couple could separate and both partners couldremarry [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]