Once a marriage is contracted, it then must be lived. A man and woman who have agreed to marry, and agreed that the aim of that marriage is children, must now negotiate their new identities as husband and wife, and their new roles managing the property that has come to them through their marriage. During the post-Imperial period, this negotiation become even more complex as cultural landscapes changed and the conceptions of marriage changed with them. Marriage is a mutable and multifaceted institution, constantly in flux, and it is therefore extremely difficult to generalise about the experience or meaning of being a husband or wife. This is particularly true for Christian marriage in a period where the meaning of lay Christianity was still being negotiated. We can however explore the conversations concerning marriage that were had across multiple textual genres and examine how marriage and marital relationships were discussed.

In this chapter, we explore the roles of husband and wife as defined by their legal obligations and duties to one another, and the ways in which their behaviours were discussed. Much of this discussion centres on the influence of Christian theology and genre on the construction of marriage and marital roles through discussions of sex, power and gender. We begin by exploring the limits and definitions of marriage in different spheres. In this period, we see a distinction between the legal sphere and the Christian regarding the purpose of marriage. While the legal texts view marriage as being a contractual procedure for the purpose of creating legitimate heirs, and therefore as a mechanism for the lawful passing on of property, the Christian discourse on marriage is much more interested in the process by which those heirs are conceived and views marriage as a mechanism for theologically legitimising sex for reproduction. While both perceived children to be the core purpose of marriage, there were divides in the meaning of reproduction and therefore the meaning of marriage between the two discourses. For the legal sphere, the implications were narrower than in the non-legal: because heirs are the purpose of marriage, the focus of legal concern with marriage was with property. Thus, all legal conversations concerning marital relationships concerned the management, ownership and transfer of property and delineate a marriage and the relationship between a husband and wife purely along these lines.