Vows
The Modern Genius of an Ancient Rite
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From the bestselling author of Home Comforts comes the “timely” (The New Yorker), “fascinating, and morally serious,” (The Wall Street Journal) story of our wedding vows—what they mean and why they still matter.
In the West, marrying is so thoroughly identified with ceremonial promises that “taking vows” is a synonym for getting married. So, it’s a surprise to realize that this custom is actually a historical and anthropological oddity. Most of the world, for most of history, married without making promises. And there’s a reason for that. Marriage by vow presupposes free choice, and free choice makes a love-match possible. It is a very modern arrangement.
Vows is both a moving memoir of two marriages and an “illuminating” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) meditation on marriage itself. Cheryl Mendelson tackles the sociology of commitment through our most traditional promises and shows why they endure. In considering the kind of marriage these vows entail, she helps answer some of life’s most urgent and personal questions: Could I, would I, or should I make these promises to someone? Using history and literature, the book describes the parameters of the behavior that traditional vows promise and, in doing so, answers a whole series of other questions: Why did wedding-by-vow arise only in the West? Why are they recited in weddings around the world today? Why have these vows lasted for nearly a thousand years? Why does the kind of marriage promised in the vows survive?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Coming skeptically to the topic in light of a recent divorce, bestseller Mendelson (Home Comforts) takes an illuminating deep dive into the meaning of wedding vows that reveals these binding phrases to still be "exactly what love... wants to say." Though vows were an ancient form of contract law, they did not enter into wedding rites until the Middles Ages, for the simple reason that marriage contracts were between heads of families. For example, in ancient Rome, while the marriage rite itself involved the couple, the contract was made between the groom and the father of the bride. In medieval Europe, Christian ideas about free will and choice in marriage led to the adoption of ceremonial wedding vows that resembled feudal fealty oaths, but—in what Mendelson suggests was a radical innovation—were "identical for man and woman." Mainly consisting of a promise to "keep" the other spouse "in sickness and health," these vows made "a dramatic statement... of real equality between the couple." While reactionary variations that differentiated women's role in marriage as subservient emerged almost immediately, Mendelson tracks how vows continued to stand as a popular symbol of free choice, free love, and gender equality through subsequent centuries. The wide-ranging narrative draws on an impressive array of sources, from Ovid to the polyamorous Oneida community in 19th-century New York. It's a hugely informative history of the very idea of what makes a marriage.
