Marital sexual debt

Marital sexual debt was the expectation that a wife owed sexual access to her husband. The book identifies this expectation as the basis for the legality of marital rape in medieval society. It sits within a wider account of marriage in which a woman’s fidelity and reproductive role mattered to family inheritance, while the limits on a husband’s sexual claims were described very differently.

Definition and Legal Setting

The book states that marital rape was legal because wives were understood to owe a sexual debt to their husbands. It places this rule within a broader medieval setting in which families could marry girls as young as twelve to men several times their age, who were then free to demand what the marriage was understood to entitle them to. The account describes the rule as a legal and social condition, not as evidence that wives freely consented.

Marriage, Chastity, and Inheritance

The expectation of sexual access existed alongside a strict demand for wives’ chastity. Aristocratic women were expected to be loyal to their husbands, and control over their fidelity was tied to confidence that heirs belonged to the husband’s family line. In the account of Jean de Carrouges and Marguerite de Carrouges’s marriage, Marguerite’s youth and perceived virtue offered Jean assurance that she would bear legitimate heirs. The contrast is stark: women’s sexuality was treated as consequential to inheritance and closely policed, while the marital sexual debt denied them an equivalent claim to refuse their husbands.

Power and Vulnerability

The surrounding account shows how expectations of female fidelity could compound a woman’s vulnerability. After the assault Marguerite reported, Jacques Le Gris warned that her husband might suspect her of adultery rather than believe her; the book notes that husbands sometimes killed wives suspected of adultery and escaped punishment. This danger is distinct from the marital sexual debt itself, but it belongs to the same unequal structure: a wife could be held to strict standards of chastity while facing limited protection when she challenged male sexual power.