In 1997 Pauline Stafford noted that ‘[g]eneralizing about marriage, Medieval or modern, is an exciting but often misleading activity’ and this seems a fitting conclusion for such a diverse chapter. What is clear is that there are competing discourses of marriage and married life across the multiple available genres.

The key issues of sex, power and property reappear regularly but all tend to be separated from one another – authors who discuss sex tend not to discuss property, and so on. Thus, how these issues interacted with one another and how indeed a husband and wife interacted with one another is left obscure. What we can see is that the legal texts and the literary Christian texts diverge strongly in theme and tone, and indeed in relationship to the Imperial West. The legal texts, for the most part, maintain the same ideas and ideologies of the Imperial Roman world – from manus to adultery – showing only minor shifts in the later texts. The literary, Christian texts are where we find the most dramatic shifts in the cultural discussion of marriage and married life. From the correct way to conduct ones’ sex life, to correct power and conversational relations between husband and wife, it is the Christian writers who were introducing innovative conceptions of marriage and of correct marital behaviour. Although they too propagate older, Roman ideals of marital concord, in stylised, rhetorical texts, they also provide new ideas and new models of good and bad behaviour for their readers. Thus, marriage in the post-Imperial world is a difficult thing to generalise about, as it appears in a state of ongoing flux and re-re-negotiation, where Roman Imperial constructions were gradually fading, to be replaced eventually by a Christian notion of marriage as a spiritual, heavenly bond.