Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History podcast. I'm your host, Heather Tusco. Since it's February, which is the month of Valentine's Day, when thoughts turn to romance and love, I thought it would be appropriate to do an episode on love and marriage. I know I had said I would do something on the tutor colleges, and I'm still

working on that, so you'll just have to stay tuned. So let's get started with a few general

thoughts about love and marriage in the Renaissance. One thing to think about is that customs did

differ between the period of the early tutors and Queen Elizabeth. There was a span of over

120 years there, and certainly we can

see in our own time that our own views of marriage has changed greatly in the past 120 years.

So to take any one time period and use it as a snapshot for the entire Renaissance period wouldn't be

accurate. It's also really fascinating to look a little bit before the Renaissance to see where some

of the customs from the 16th century came from. Interestingly, in the medieval period, in

addition to legally binding marriage, concubineage was also socially recognized and legally binding

and had rights similar to marriage. If there was no property to be transferred,

but one simply wanted companionship, one could enter into a concubine relationship.

And also early Frankish society recognized two levels of marriage, one which involved

transferring property rights, and the other didn't. Moving onwards, by the 16th century,

the Catholic Church had formalized marriage into the recognizable institution that we would be

familiar with, though there were still some lingering considerations when dealing with the transfer

of property. Girls could get married at the age of 12, For boys, it was 14, though usually only noble

arranged marriages between princes and princesses of different countries had betrothal

ceremonies and got married this young. The official age of consent was 21, and Thomas

Moore himself recommended that girls not marry before 18 and boys not before 22.

For non-noble families, the average age of marriage was similar to what it is now, around 25 or 26 for men,

and 23 or 24 for women. This was largely because men needed to finish apprenticeships before they could

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