The ‘perfect marriage”, religious culture and political sentiments

Abstract

This article analyzes the long-term cultural permanence of feudal servitude in terms of gender relations. The permanence of Western Christianity in the processes of modernizing codes on civil unions in the nineteenth century implied a political and ideological struggle which divided the legal field, also serving to update the concepts of the ‘perfect marriage” and the ‘perfect wife” (constructions belonging to the moral theology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). Along with reviving marriage as a sacrament, this also led to the dominance and control of the female condition, with ramifications on debates on abortion and the perfect body in modern times, such as the idea that the perfect wife or the perfect woman should (still) not eat too much. This work aims to discuss several cultural permanences, focusing on less recent moral theology and its historical updating for modern times, in light of an analysis of its cultural appropriation. The discussion implies an identification and description of the practices of reading and publishing the work of moral theologians on the female body. We also methodologically consider the history of ideas, highlighting the complexity of aspects intervening in studies on the field of the history of political culture. Whether by means of an analysis of political, legal and religious ideas or in the interpretation of political culture, we have combined traditional research procedures belonging to the history of ideas with epistemological procedures characteristic of the evidential method. We also interpret moral theologians’ texts, combining an analysis of form and content.