Ryan Reeder
History 351
Prof. Kendall Brown
1 December 1999
In her book, To Love Honor and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice 1574-1821, Patricia Seed describes the changes in societal values affecting the outcomes of prenuptial disputes in colonial Mexico. The disputes she analyzes generally pertain to parental opposition to their children's marriages. In the beginning of this era, such attempts were rarely successful; over the course of the centuries, however, their success more than quadrupled. While the underlying motivations for these familial feuds did not change much, the attitudes of the church and state did. So how did government, ecclesiastical, and parental jurisdiction and effectiveness transform during this period? Well, I'm glad you asked, 'cause I'm a-gonna tell ya. (Just to give you an occasional respite in the fairly dry style of this paper. Would've been kinda nice if Seed had done the same, ¿no?)
One major factor was that the crown continually asserted increased control over marriages, forcing the Catholic church to redefine its position. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the church frequently wielded tools such as secret marriages, the royal police, temporary custody, and the threat of excommunication to override parental will in favor of the betrothed. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Church's use of these tools became increasingly rare. This "crucial transformation. . .did not take place in the behavior of parents in the intervening two hundred years." It resulted from shifts in the church's position, increased governmental control, and, especially, the underlying social values and mores, such as the concept of honor, that formed the policies of church and state.
At the commencement of the colonial period, honor was defined in two ways-the keeping of one's word or promise for men, and sexual purity for women. When either of these were in jeopardy, for example, if there had been a promise of marriage or a loss of virginity, it was deemed sufficient cause for the church to perform the marriage by whatever means necessary, parental objections notwithstanding (provided both participants were willing, of course). Parents had to couch their arguments in terms of prohibitive or diriment impediments, such as vows of chastity, impotence, or having made vows of chastity for the ministry. By the end of this period however, the concept of honor had evolved; first it included concepts of the "superiority of rank and birth" (140) in addition to matters of personal integrity, later it stressed the innate superiority sense of honor over promise keeping and chastity. As the concept of honor was altered, parents were able to reveal their actual reasons for opposing the marriages of their children with much greater success. These reasons included matters of societal position, economic power, and, quite often, racial status.
As the conceptual values of society were redefined, so were the roles of church and state. The church, rather than seeing itself as the courageous enforcer of truth and honor, began to perceive itself as an impartial forum for the parties involved. The state, earlier a bystander in marital disputes, became much more involved through Charles III's issue of the Pragmatic of 1776. This document gave parents the exclusive rights to veto the marriages of sons under twenty-five and daughters under twenty-three. Through this and other reforms, the crown transferred control of marriages from the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical to royal courts.
Well, I told you I'd make a couple of breaks in the style of this paper, and since I haven't since the introduction, I'll give you one here. Had to get in all that muck first. Hope you made it through it all. "Jurisdiction of ecclesiastical to royal courts"-Sheesh! Wadupwidat? Most of the rest of the paper's in the same style. Hope you made it through it all. I guess I gotta give you a decent conclusion and some really snappy last words now. Whatever. It probably should be about how Catholics and Spanish kings changed their attitudes about their place in settling marital disputes. The Catholic church relinquished their once nearly omnipotent control as the concepts of honor mutated and the relative importance of love and free will declined. The crown filled that void, and disputing parents became the benefactors at the expense of their children. Whereas "92 percent of the conflicts. . .between 1580 and 1689 were resolved not for the parents but in favor of the couple," (80) by 1779, parental success rates had increased to 36 percent (178), reflecting an increase of more than four hundred percent. There.
Patricia Seed. To Love, Honor and Obey in Colonia Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574-1821. Stanford University Press: Stanford, California, 1988.