Mariage, amour et parenté à Byzance aux XIe-XIIIe siècles

This book brings together five surveys focusing on marriage and alliances in Byzantium in the 11th-13th centuries. For society as a whole, marriage, a family affair, was an association between spouses, where affection was emphasized, but where love and passion had nothing to do with it. The Church was more interested in controlling the institution of marriage than in controlling sexuality in general. Faced with this growing control, the aristocracy reacted in various ways, thwarting its policy of alliances by forcing divorces and tonsuring women to break alliances that had become useless. The level of first cousins, the subject of recent affinity-based marriage bans, marks the limit of family property management.