Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne. Sara McDougall

It turns next to court action in the late medieval diocese of Troyes, examining over a hundred investigations of alleged bigamy, focusing on first male and second female behavior, in two separate chapters. I treat the bigamy committed by men and by women separately for an important reason. Modern scholars generally assume that few people committed bigamy in the Middle Ages, but that those few would have almost all been male. This supposition requires some correction. Certainly most convicted bigamists were male. One of my discoveries described in my dissertation, however, was that both men and women committed bigamy in late medieval France. The ecclesiastical courts and their communities responded to the two acts of remarriage in different ways, depending on the gender of the bigamist.¹¹ As I have argued elsewhere,¹² for a woman to commit bigamy had different social, cultural, and economic consequences than those found with male bigamy. If her husband disappeared and she was left in precarious social and financial straits, even her husband’s own family might wish to see her remarried and provided for.¹³ These two chapters seek to explain both these differences in behavior and the different response male and female bigamy found in society and in the courtroom.

      Two subsequent chapters address first, why people—men and women—committed bigamy, and second, why ecclesiastical officials in Troyes came to prosecute bigamy. As I argue, men and women living in fifteenth-century northern France committed bigamy for a number of reasons, emotional and economic. The chief reason, however, was not that they had been insufficiently Christianized, as some scholars have argued. The contrary is the case. In fact, these men and women had been quite successfully convinced of the various blessings and benefits that Christian, sacramental marriage conferred on a couple. This conviction, however, did not always arrive accompanied by a notion that the canon law of marriage need in all things be respected. These men and women who remarried despite being already married to a living spouse made a significant choice in remarrying. With a first spouse distant or undesirable, they had found someone else whom they wished to live with and have children with, and wanted to marry. Or they wished to marry, when economic need or social status required it. In any case, they wished to marry, not because they were insufficiently Christianized and as a result thought so little of marriage, but because they had accepted the Christian ideal of marriage and thought a great deal of it. Marriage had become an extremely important institution in late medieval society. Quite a few people were willing to break the law to marry, legally or not. This shows not a lack of Christianization but rather what might be described as too much or too successful Christianization. Ecclesiastical officials, however, were not always willing to tolerate this abuse of marriage law. At least the judicial officers of the bishop’s court of Troyes acted to prevent and prosecute bigamy throughout the fifteenth century. The activities of those ecclesiastical officials in Troyes are the topic of the final chapter.

      Beginning in the second decade of the fifteenth century, in the wake of the Hundred Years’ War, we find traces of a massive effort to police marriage practice in the dioceses of northern France. Ecclesiastical officials made an astonishing effort to regulate both marriage formation and intact marriages in a time and place of upheaval and confusion; a time and place in which married life and marital status were often uncertain. Who, indeed, amid outbreaks of plague or the Hundred Years’ War, was clearly a widow or widower? Nevertheless, the court in Troyes summoned hundreds of men and women before it, ordering them to put an end to irregular or suspect unions and return to their spouses, if they could be found.

      The chief reason for this is that marriage mattered a great deal, to ecclesiastical officials and to their parishioners alike. Men who had left their wives behind or had been themselves abandoned wanted new wives, new families. Abandoned wives wanted husbands and risked violating the law to remarry, for better or worse. In peace and in war, marriage was an institution in which these men and women were eager to partake. However, these desires came into conflict with an ecclesiastical drive to restrict married Christians to one living spouse. The essential role of monogamy in Christian identity thus served as a site of conflict and as a defining feature of Christian marriage as formed in the Middle Ages.

      CHAPTER 1

      Marriage and Remarriage in the Later Middle Ages

      Law, Theology, and Culture

      The fifteenth-century registers of the Bishop of Troyes’s judicial court tell a strange story.¹ Amid the destruction and chaos of the Hundred Years’ War, in the Champagne region of northeastern France people were marrying more often than the law permitted. More curious still, in the course of concerted efforts to restore order in the diocese, the bishop’s judicial court investigated and prosecuted many of these oft-married men and women, detaining them in the bishop’s prison in the course of an investigation and fining the largest number of offenders. Those found to have willfully violated the law in their mode of marrying (almost all men) the court subjected to public punishment and lengthy imprisonment.

      That such prosecutions took place at all, let alone with such vigor, will surprise many historians of medieval and early modern France. Historians have not recognized how interventionist northern French church courts could be in matters of remarriage. To be sure, scholars who study the records of local church courts, called officialities, have begun to recognize that northern France served as host to unusually proactive and regulatory ecclesiastical courts.² But we have not understood two central factors of this regulatory behavior: we have recognized neither the importance of remarriage in this context nor how energetically these courts, and the diocesan court of Troyes in particular, acted to prevent and prosecute bigamy.

      My purpose in this chapter is to situate the reader in the legal, theological, cultural, and social context of marriage and remarriage at the end of the Middle Ages, as background to the court action that took place in fifteenth-century Troyes. Beginning with some of the major historiographical trends, I then turn to the theological and legal rules for marriage and marriage symbolism in particular, studying the impact of these rules in late medieval law, court practice, and society. I close with a description of the surviving court records of the officiality of Troyes, the principal sources for this book, and an initial analysis of the bigamy cases found in the these records.

      We have known for some time that marriage arrived at something of a crisis point at the end of the Middle Ages. We have known this not least because postmedieval sources say so with such vehemence. For somehow the sixteenth century bursts forth with complaints, criticisms, and the most radical solutions to seemingly all-consuming problems with marriage—problems not only with the canon law of marriage itself and the ecclesiastical courts charged with implementing these rules but also with the behavior of ordinary Christians who married in ways that offended ecclesiastics, theologians, jurists, and reformers of all stripes on both sides of a growing confessional divide.³

      What was this crisis about? If the rules governing Christian marriage were to blame, scholarship on medieval law and the family has suggested two possibilities: incest prohibitions and clandestine marriage. This book will offer a third: remarriage.

      To begin with incest prohibitions, it might seem natural to suppose that the medieval Church’s infamously expansive prohibitions on marriage between those related by blood, marriage, or spiritual bonds were the principal source of the crisis. In fact, there was a time when many scholars described these incest prohibitions as one of the most burning issues of medieval marriage litigation. Out of all of these rules and regulations that emerged in the Christian Middle Ages, those concerning consanguinity, or blood ties, were long considered the most important aspect of medieval marriage formation and dissolution.⁴ In particular, the prominent and influential scholars Jack Goody and Georges Duby occupied themselves greatly with explaining and emphasizing medieval concerns over incestuous marriage.⁵ One can certainly understand why these scholars focused on consanguinity prohibitions and their role in western European marriage practices. Medieval canon law and theological writings offer a wealth of discussion on forbidden, incestuous marriages, accompanied by genealogical trees depicting kinship and expressions of horror over the monstrous children incestuous unions might produce. If we measure the importance of a topic by the sheer volume of treatment in known medieval canonical and theological sources,