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The Knight, the Lady and the Priest
Georges Duby
Georges Duby's *The Knight, the Lady and the Priest* asks a deceptively simple question — what did marriage actually mean to the nobility of medieval France? — and turns it into a panoramic history of power, sex, and the Church. Duby, one of the great French medievalists and a leading figure of the Annales school, traces the long struggle between two competing models of marriage: the aristocratic one, in which lineage and land dictated whom you wed and whether you could set a wife aside, and the ecclesiastical one, in which the Church slowly imposed monogamy, consent, and indissolubility. First published in French in 1981 and in English in 1983, it is scholarly but vivid, built from chronicles and Church records. For readers curious about how the modern idea of marriage was forged, it is a bracing, argument-driven classic.
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The author
Georges Duby (1919–1996) was among the most influential medievalists of the twentieth century, holder of the chair in medieval history at the Collège de France and a member of the Académie française. A central figure of the Annales school, he was famous for using social and economic evidence to reconstruct the mentalities of the medieval world.
The book
Originally Le chevalier, la femme et le prêtre (1981) and translated by Barbara Bray, the book examines the aristocracy of the tenth through twelfth centuries as two ideas of marriage collided. On one side stood noble families treating marriage as a tool of lineage and property; on the other, a reforming Church insisting that marriage be monogamous, consensual, and permanent. Out of that friction, Duby argues, the modern institution took shape.
How it reads
It is a work of serious scholarship written with unusual narrative flair — dense with medieval chronicle yet consistently readable. Its central argument has been debated and refined by later historians, but it remains a standard point of entry to the history of marriage and gender in the Middle Ages.
For more context
It pairs well with Duby's other studies of medieval society and with broader histories of the medieval Church's reform movement.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Georges Duby
- Publisher
- Pantheon
- Year
- 1983
- ISBN
- 0-394-52445
- Format
- Paperback
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Maine