seven, before the age of consent. In other words, she could be married against her will.
If the husband had sex with her (even against her will), then this sealed the marriage and
the girl could not annul the marriage. In the twelfth century, Pope Alexander III ruled:
If a girl of tender age is betrothed and delivered to her husband, and afterwards
desires to marry a different man, her petition is not to be granted if her husband
swears that he has had carnal knowledge of her even at the early age of eleven or
twelve. [3]
The Christian scholars ruled that even if a seven year old girl had sex before reaching the
age of puberty, the fact that she had sex proves that she was mature enough to be married.
In other words, the minimum criteria to marry a girl is that a man can have sex with her.
When a man wants to marry a young girl, all he has to do is marry her and then have sex
with her. In a very circular logic, the sex he had with her will validate his marriage and
prevent an annulment. Christian Law therefore dictates that it does not matter how young
a girl is, or whether or not she has attained the age of puberty; all that truly matters is that
her husband can penetrate her and have sex. Once he does this, nobody can oppose or
annul the marriage.
C. Yandell writes in “Carpe Corpus: Time and Gender in Early Modern France”:
In canon law, puberty normally determines marriageable age, although the
minimum age for marriage is seven years, "the age of reason", when a child is
deemed capable of consent. The lawyer Estienne Pasquier notes that the Digest
compiled by Justinian specifies fourteen years for men, twelve for women, but, he
adds, if one is capable of carnal cohabitation before this age, marriage is
permitted.
(Carpe Corpus: Time and Gender in Early Modern France, by Cathy Yandell
p.37,
http://books.google.com/books?id=YXs...A37&lpg=PA37&d
q
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[3] Quoted in John Fulton, The Laws of Marriage (New York: E. and J.B. Young, 1883), 112. 18
The Islamaphobe’s Glass House Hashimi
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