A Non-Legal History of Medieval Jewish Marriage

Elisheva Baumgarten discussed her current project "A non-legal history of medieval Jewish marriage". After introducing the times and places she works on (broadly the medieval Ashkenazic Jewish communities, from the twelfth-fourteenth centuries), she discussed legal sources and the information about marriage practices learned from them, as well as some of the misreadings of these sources by scholars. She then focused on a number of non-legal stories: moral advice, tales, magical formulas, and presented the information one can glean from them. She concluded with some thoughts about the extent to which legal sources, that have long been a central source for studying history, are or aren't representative of lived experience.