In the records from local courts in other parts of Europe, further evidence of such a firm line on remarriage does not emerge with any consistency. One fifteenth-century court exhibits if anything the reverse attitude to that found in Troyes. In southern Germany, in the diocese of Regensburg, not only did the officiality not subject bigamists to public punishment or imprisonment, but men and women who approached the court seeking permission to remarry—or even to stay married despite being already married to an absent spouse—received explicit permission from the official to do so.91 In England and Italy, while courts did not go so far as to grant permission to remarry without proof, the courts seemed on the whole to handle remarriage with a policy of “don’t ask don’t tell,” a policy that often continued well into the sixteenth century.92 Those married to an absent spouse simply—and not necessarily quietly—remarried, and the court asked no questions unless a suit was brought to challenge the legitimacy of the marriage because of a prior bond. Emlyn Eisenach has found remarkably overt abuse of the canon law governing remarriage in Verona, practices that ended in the 1520s, when regulation of remarriage and prosecution of bigamy began at the instigation of a reforming bishop.93 These differences in both practice and court proceedings concerning remarriage in the fifteenth century, with Regensburg and Troyes at opposite extremes in legal practice, offer some indication of the range of ways in which ecclesiastical courts in fifteenth-century Europe implemented marriage law. At the same time, the evidence of different social attitudes toward remarriage at some, usually lower, levels of society in Verona and Venice may well be indicative of much broader social practice in other parts of Europe.
Even within northern France and Burgundian lands, courts did not see fit always and everywhere to require proof of death before allowing a remarriage. Emmanuël Falzone found one case from Cambrai in which a married woman approached the court seeking permission to remarry.94 On 22 September 1452 Renaude Coppine, the wife of Pierre, had not seen Pierre in two years and wished to remarry. Pierre had left on pilgrimage to Rome but had not returned. In order to prove that Renaude could claim the status of a widow, the official ordered the announcement of banns, designed to seek out any evidence that Pierre lived. If no objections were made, Renaude could be permitted to remarry.
We find a similar practice in one case from Rouen, examined in Carole Avignon’s dissertation. In 1520, two wives who claimed their husbands had abandoned them wished to remarry and approached the official. The official ordered that the parish priests of each man should issue summons during mass for three successive Sundays, calling for the missing husbands to present themselves. If the men themselves or some news of their status did not emerge, the two women could remarry.95
Such a handling of remarriage may have had deep roots in France. A comparable practice is found in Gautier d’Arras’s twelfth-century story “Ille et Galeron,”96 a tale dedicated to a second wife, Beatrix, the wife of Frederick Barbarossa. In that tale the pope wishes the valiant Ille to marry the emperor’s daughter in Rome, but Ille demurs on the grounds that he is already married to the absent (but really not at all far off) Galeron. The pope then orders that a summons seeking Galeron be issued in Galeron’s home diocese. No trace of Galeron is found, Ille agrees to remarry, and the marriage is only prevented (temporarily) by the arrival of Galeron at the door of St. Peter’s on the wedding day.
If Gautier d’Arras, and much more to the point, Hostiensis—along with most canon law commentators—and the officials of Cambrai and Rouen all found such a procedure satisfactory, however, the official in Troyes did not, and this “new” attitude found in Troyes would slowly come to prevail in the Catholic countries of the sixteenth century. A similar attitude can be found in the records of the Paris officiality, in at least one case. In 1500, one Marguerite came before the court seeking permission to remarry. She claimed to be the wife of a long-absent husband who had left her, gone to London, married another woman and had children with her, and died. In this case, Marguerite produced two witnesses to her husband’s death in hopes that she could receive permission to remarry.97 The scholarship of Charles Donahue, Ruth Karras, and Léon Pommeray on Paris reveals similar cases, as well as the prosecution of those who failed to find proof before remarriage.98
This strict regulation of remarriage also extended to include harsh punishment, or at least the threat of it. The real seriousness with which some courts, at least, viewed bigamy is demonstrated by the prescribed treatment of those found to have seriously violated the law. In some statute collections we find specified punishments for those who willfully married despite being already married. Deemed “infamous” in Roman legal tradition,99 their infamy, their status as infamous, was to be displayed to the public by exposing them upon the ladder of the scaffold. A crime committed against the public, as the underlying logic explained, required public punishment, public acknowledgment, and expiation of the wrongdoing.
To offer two examples, the thirteenth-century synodal statutes of the diocese of Tours and the statutes of the neighboring northwestern diocese, Château-Gontier, threatened those guilty of double marriages or engagements with public punishment, enacted on the “scala.”100 As explained in Ducange’s glossary of medieval Latin101 and as illustrated in images such as those identified by Barbara Morel,102 this tool of punishment was the ladder leading up to the scaffold. Such public display on the ladder was used to punish those found guilty of bigamy, of false testimony, of blasphemy, or public scandal of some kind.
So at least the statutes declared. We can and should distinguish between laws that mention this type of punishment and actual evidence of its use. In fact, we know of no bigamists actually placed on the ladder of the scaffold in Tours or Château-Gontier. Indeed, we know of no case in which such punishments were carried out for such an offense in any part of Europe before the fifteenth century. The court records of the fifteenth century are often the earliest surviving sources. As a result, when exactly enforcement of these rules began remains a question we cannot satisfactorily answer.
Nonetheless, we do find scattered evidence of use beginning in the fourteenth century. Bigamists were punished on the ladder in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Troyes and, if evidently less often, in Paris, Senlis, Rouen, Malines, Pamiers,103 and in the fourteenth century in Marseilles.104 In the south, this punishment came at the hands of secular rather than ecclesiastical officials. Returning north, we can also point to similar proceedings against bigamists that resulted in different punishments, such as penitential processions, pilgrimage, or imprisonment, from Châlons, Cambrai, Bourges, Paris, and Brussels.105 Secular court records from Dijon include fines levied against bigamists in the fourteenth century, possibly if not necessarily part of a process that also included ecclesiastical prosecution and punishment,106 and in 1520 the prévôt of Sens, a secular official, sentenced a bigamist to be whipped before sending him on to the official of Sens, presumably for annulment of the second marriage and for some form of ecclesiastical punishment.107 The surviving synodal statutes from Paris, Rouen, and Troyes, unlike Tours and Château-Gontier, do not specify the use of the punishment of the ladder for bigamy, or indeed any other punishment. Nevertheless, these courts certainly made use of both the ladder of the scaffold and the bishop’s prison as instruments of punishment for bigamy throughout the fifteenth century. As we will see in the final chapter, the officiality in Troyes used these punishments for a variety of offenses in Troyes, and bigamy ranked among them. In fact, the laity of the diocese met punishment on the ladder for no other crime so often as bigamy.
Indeed, between 1426 and 1468 we have remarkably consistent evidence of use, in Troyes, of the ladder and the prison to punish bigamy. The combination of exposure on the ladder and imprisonment was used against those seen to have most grossly violated the norms of the community: bigamists and clerics who became brigands, clerics who not only bore arms but fought battles and attacked noncombatants, stole, pillaged, killed, and raped. Also of great importance is the contemporary context of these prosecutions. In