What did it mean to be a wife, woman, or slave in a society in which a land-owning woman was forbidden to lay with her male slave but the same slave might be allowed to take concubines? Jurists frequently compared marriage to purchase and divorce to manumission. The emerging consensus demonstrated a self-perpetuating analogy between a husband’s status as master and a wife’s as slave, even as jurists insisted on the dignity of free women and the masculine rights of enslaved husbands. This book presents an analysis of how jurists conceptualized marriage : its rights and obligations, using the same rhetoric of ownership used to describe slavery. As the jurists discussed claims spouses could make on each other: including dower, sex, obedience, and companionship, they returned repeatedly to issues of legal status: wife and concubine, slave and free, male and female.