ABSTRACT
Women who became brides of Christ while married to living men first stymied medieval hagiographers and now perplex historians of Christianity. These women’s marital obligations to both physical and spiritual spouses potentially created domestic tensions and challenged dominant beliefs about the importance of celibacy. Some medieval hagiographers, as in the above verses from Middle High German adaptation of Dietrich of Apolda’s life and miracles of St. Elizabeth of Hungary (1207-31), valorized caring for both worldly and spiritual spouses as a sanctified domesticity. These married brides of Christ were practicing their religion in ways and in spaces appropriate for the laity. In response, some clergy began promoting marriage to Jesus to the laity guided relationships between married laywomen, their worldly husbands, and Christ. Married men and women across northern Europe encountered Jesus as a bridegroom in art, sermons, and devotional books, knew the same master narrative, and believed they could step into the role of bride without entering a religious order. Pious medieval housewives would even provide inspiration and admonishment for the professional religious, who incorporated domestic piety into their communal life. Though some women sought chastity after a spiritual experience, either persuading their husbands to a celibate marriage, or Josephsehe, modeled on the marriage between Mary and Joseph, or emulating Judith by becoming holy widows, their religious conversions did not end marriages, they merely complicated them. Confession and the Eucharist were only available following periods of abstinence. Childbirth and pregnancy kept women temporarily out of church. The hours of the liturgical day conflicted with housework and childcare, the liturgical night with sleep and sex. Remarrying Jesus required careful negotiations with spouses and confessors, but those who managed to balance religious vocation and family obligation inspired subsequent generations of married Christians and celibate religious to live in the world as brides of Christ.
