In the Middle Ages women – whether religious or lay – were assumed to be someone's wife. A woman who became bride of Christ, having taken the veil or given a vow of celibacy, could be imagined to be under a kind of male patriarchal and institutional control, just like the wife of an earthly husband. These analogies seem, at first glance, to be easy to imagine and conceptualize. However, how was such a spiritual marriage to be visualized? And how was the union between the Church as bride and Christ as bridegroom, frequently imagined by theologians, intellectuals, and canonists, represented visually in the Middle Ages? What were the visual differences, if any, between a spiritual and a mundane marriage?

Marriage symbolism in the Middle Ages involved a wide array of nuptial themes, one of which was Christ's union with the Church. Nevertheless, as Philip Reynolds notes in his recent book, the comparison between a mundane marriage and the union between Christ and the Church was a rarity before 1100. My purpose in this essay is to explore the relationship between visual images and theological and intellectual ideas in twelfth- and thirteenth-century illuminated manuscripts and to expand on Reynolds’ essay in this book by making a comparison between conjugal and nuptial symbolism in visual art.

Representations of Marriage in Illuminated Manuscripts

Marriage as an iconographic theme in Classical Antiquity and in the Middle Ages has been carefully studied by scholars. Jérôme Baschet and Chiara Frugoni have discussed marriage iconography both in monumental art (sculpture, paintings, and architecture) and in illuminated manuscripts, with an interesting excursus on the different representations of marriage from Antiquity until the Middle Ages.