There is another reason why we should not limit ourselves to a narrow understanding of bigamy, for the hostility toward remarriage affected more Christians than those clergy who wished to advance in orders and those men and women who wished to remarry despite being already married to a living spouse. It also affected a third category of persons: Christian widows and widowers were also tainted by the brush of bigamy when they remarried, even though their remarriages did not violate canon law.
The attitudes of medieval people toward widows have received a good deal of attention from scholars whose findings reveal manifold pressures on widows not to remarry.51 Katherine Clark has argued that making marriage one of the sacraments of the Church and the concern over helping souls out of purgatory as formed in the High Middle Ages had real impact on widows in particular, and above all in the later Middle Ages. These theological ideas, she argues, provided an incentive to push women toward maintaining a chaste widowhood on the death of their husbands. If widows refrained from remarriage, they might instead focus their energies on a “spiritual housekeeping” that would propel their late husbands all the faster into heaven.52 Clark gives the example of a fourteenth-century poetic tale entitled “The Gast of Gy.” This story recounts the experiences of a widow haunted by the ghost of her husband, who was suffering in purgatory because of an undisclosed sexual sin they had committed together. Tormented, he begged her to intercede for him. The wife consulted a Dominican friar, who convinced the deceased husband to stop haunting his wife if she promised to remain unmarried and pay for three hundred masses to save his soul.53 Widows, Clark concludes, were encouraged to remain faithful to their deceased spouses. Doing so not only upheld the principles of indissoluble marriage but also might concentrate and improve on a widow’s efforts to hurry a deceased spouse out of purgatory.
Other scholars have concurred with Clark that hostile attitudes toward widows who sought to remarry had hardened by the High and especially late Middle Ages. In places such as Italy, England, and the Low Countries, social and economic disincentives for widows who remarried increased.54 Scholars point in particular to legislation on property rights and inheritance. They argue, for example, that marital property regimes in some places were specifically designed to discourage remarriage.55 Widows who remarried might lose guardianship of their children or some or all of their inheritance from their deceased husband.56
Moreover, widows who remarried might face social derision in addition to economic losses. Scorn for those who remarried was often expressed in a popular ritual such as charivari.57 In these carnivalesque events, the wedding night of a couple was disturbed by a procession of rowdy singers and hecklers.58 It is important to recognize how prominently scorn for remarriage by widows as well as widowers figured in the culture of charivari. Charivaris have generally been understood by modern scholars as popular expressions of unrest by young unmarried men who were reacting to the marriage of an older man to a young woman they themselves might have liked to marry.59 Natalie Davis has offered a refined version of this interpretation. As Davis argues, charivari took place because of a need to placate the dead spouse and as a sort of expression of consideration for the children from the first marriage. Most important for Davis, the rites took place as expression of communal resentment when an old widow or widower took a young, eligible spouse, thus depriving village youths of a spouse their own age and the village itself of the greatest possible number of offspring.60
These popular rites are also susceptible to a quite different interpretation.61 As Claude Gauvard observed, these rites did in fact typically involve the remarriage of a widow or widower. If viewed in the larger cultural context of medieval marriage symbolism, it seems probable that the charivari was enacted against second marriages because of a distaste for second marriages that developed more from theological quibbles than societal. Theologians and canonists had offered much by way of derision and exclusion for second marriages, depriving these unions of the nuptial blessing, a ritual reserved to first marriages only,62 and even debating if such marriages were sacramental, if ultimately deciding they were. Charivaris too robbed second marriages of their honor.
Second marriages may well have provoked charivari simply as second marriages, different and less holy than first unions, and therefore to be treated differently both by the priest who refused to perform the nuptial blessing and by the rowdy enforcers of public morality. Certainly the Church legislation suggests as much. Church officials in northern France perceived these rituals as a response to second marriages. Synodal statutes from late medieval dioceses across France include prohibitions of charivari deriding second marriages in particular:63
As it is damnable to condemn or vituperate first or second marriages, as the sacred canons declare, and as is documented in the New and Old Testaments, therefore it is a shameful or noxious game, contrary to good mores, and especially going against the sayings of the Apostle, for any marriages especially the second to be in any small way disparaged. Marriage (which our Lord Jesus Christ honored and found honorable) is overthrown in derision by those games vulgarly called charivari, games effected through horrible and blasphemous shouting and obscene sayings, under the base transfiguration of insulting devils, with insult and clamor deriding second marriages. We reprove equally libelous or slanderous songs, and we prohibit them entirely in the city and diocese of Troyes, instructing all priests and rectors of parish churches that these things be published in their churches, so that none can pretend ignorance of this prohibition, and that such games are forbidden from the part of the Reverend Father on penalty of excommunication and ten livres, to be applied in pious uses, as against the actors in these games, and as against those who help, advise, and assist them.64
Seeking to put an end to these public disturbances, Church officials throughout France, in Troyes and in other dioceses, threatened offenders with excommunication and fines if they mounted charivaris against second marriages.65 Registers of the officiality of Troyes record fines levied, for example, against those who organized a charivari for the marriage of a widow.66 In all of these sources, the perception of the charivari is the same: it is a rite enacted in mockery of second marriages. What we have with charivari is thus a popular ritual enacted to shame those who married more than once.
There is a paradox in the efforts of the Church to prevent these disturbances. The Church sought to prevent charivari but was in some sense hampered by its own doctrinal practice, for it was confronting a form of social disorder that had emerged in response to its own teachings. To be sure, the Church had traditionally insisted that all marriages, even second marriages, be performed with solemnity.67 However, second marriages were hardly treated as equal to first marriages in theology and liturgy. The charivaris were thus related to the mixed message sent by the Church’s own doctrines, by which second marriages were declared to be at once licit and reprehensible.
Further, second marriages clearly stood out in that they were denied the nuptial blessing reserved for first marriages.68 Pope Alexander III and subsequent popes forbade priests officiating at second marriages to give the nuptial blessing. As Urban III wrote, “A man or a woman, going over into bigamy [in this case, entering into a successive marriage], should not be blessed by a priest, since, having been blessed on another [previous] occasion, their blessing ought not to be repeated.”69 Alexander III ordered that a chaplain who celebrated the nuptial blessing for a second marriage be suspended from his office and benefice until absolved by the apostolic see.70
What was this blessing? Gratian described the nuptial blessing as one that we have had cause to study before in this chapter: God’s blessing of Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28, the injunction “be fruitful and multiply.”71 As Philip Reynolds has argued, use of this blessing by a priest evoked the doctrine that no man should separate what God had joined.72 This distinction, if employed by dutiful priests, offered the lay public a clear demarcation between the two kinds of marriage, as well as a sort of invitation to recognize this difference and to shame their neighbors when they married in less holy circumstances than provided by first marriages.
We also have further evidence that the presence—or absence—of the nuptial blessing mattered. As James Brundage explains, parishioners often asked