Liberal Values Defending Liberty and Enlightened Thought

Here’s a story which Mitt Romney might really find of value for his anti-France campaign. He’s already attacked France with untrue claims about marriage practices there which probably came either from a 1993 comedy or a science fiction story about Mormon practices in space. Now we have a report which argues that there was legalized same-sex marriage in medieval France:

“Western family structures have been much more varied than many people today seem to realize,” Tulchin writes in the September issue of the Journal of Modern History. “And Western legal systems have in the past made provisions for a variety of household structures.”

For example, he found legal contracts from late medieval France that referred to the term “affrèrement,” roughly translated as brotherment. Similar contracts existed elsewhere in Mediterranean Europe, Tulchin said.

In the contract, the “brothers” pledged to live together sharing “un pain, un vin, et une bourse,” (that’s French for one bread, one wine and one purse). The “one purse” referred to the idea that all of the couple’s goods became joint property. Like marriage contracts, the “brotherments” had to be sworn before a notary and witnesses, Tulchin explained.

The same type of legal contract of the time also could provide the foundation for a variety of non-nuclear households, including arrangements in which two or more biological brothers inherited the family home from their parents and would continue to live together, Tulchin said.

But non-relatives also used the contracts. In cases that involved single, unrelated men, Tulchin argues, these contracts provide “considerable evidence that the affrèrés were using affrèrements to formalize same-sex loving relationships.”

This is far from conclusive evidence, and there is also plenty of historical evidence of persecution of gay couples, but even the possibility of this should be enough to start another France-bashing campaign on the right.