2023-11-26 07:05:00
In our culture it is common to believe that love, especially romantic love, is something natural that is born with people, like breathing, but one of the charms of history is helping us understand that what we naturalize is, in reality, a human creation.
This is the case of love, the profane and the mystical, which according to the research of Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, was created in Europe in the 12th century, once the brutality of the previous stages was lost, the nobility It began to acquire more subtle forms of life and the dilemma arose of how to facilitate the physical union of men and women without disturbing the new order.
It was about solving an economic problem, linked to inheritance and the possible fragmentation of family heritage, as well as a cultural one, related to the way in which the common practices of polygamy and incest could be eliminated.
At that time, the Catholic Church was striving to deepen the Christianization of the ruling class and one of the mechanisms of social regulation was to declare marriage one of the seven sacraments and prohibit the dissolution of the marital union.
Hence, the institution of marriage is a regulated, officialized, controlled and codified act, with a framework of rites that socialize and legalize a private act, whose social function is to draw the boundaries between the norm and marginality, the licit and the illicit, the pure and the impure.
From the sublimation of the social institution of marriage as an indissoluble union comes the story of romantic love, which has as its framework a closed and sacred conjugality, linked to the consent of the spouses; Although the possibility of choosing was more nominal than real for several centuries, it constituted the germ of the recognition of the autonomy of men and women in choosing a partner, beyond economic convenience, and the creation of new selection criteria, such as beauty. and attraction.
#invention #love #Comercio