Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne
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The institution of marriage is commonly thought to have fallen into crisis in late medieval northern France. While prior scholarship has identified the pervasiveness of clandestine marriage as the cause, Sara McDougall contends that the pressure came overwhelmingly from the prevalence of remarriage in violation of the Christian ban on divorce, a practice we might call «bigamy.» Throughout the fifteenth century in Christian Europe, husbands and wives married to absent or distant spouses found new spouses to wed. In the church courts of northern France, many of the individuals so married were criminally prosecuted. In Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne , McDougall traces the history of this conflict in the diocese of Troyes and places it in the larger context of Christian theology and culture. Multiple marriage was both inevitable and repugnant in a Christian world that forbade divorce and associated bigamy with the unchristian practices of Islam or Judaism. The prevalence of bigamy might seem to suggest a failure of Christianization in late medieval northern France, but careful study of the sources shows otherwise: Clergy and laity alike valued marriage highly. Indeed, some members of the laity placed such a high value on the institution that they were willing to risk criminal punishment by entering into illegal remarriage. The risk was great: the Bishop of Troyes's judicial court prosecuted bigamy with unprecedented severity, although this prosecution broke down along gender lines. The court treated male bigamy, and only male bigamy, as a grave crime, while female bigamy was almost completely excluded from harsh punishment. As this suggests, the Church was primarily concerned with imposing a high standard on men as heads of Christian households, responsible for their own behavior and also that of their wives.
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Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne
Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor
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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 priests to give them the nuptial blessing regardless of their status. Priests had to decide how to handle couples entering into second marriages who sought the nuptial blessing despite the prohibition. Apparently, these priests often granted their parishioners’ requests and presumably were often well paid for their willingness to grant their parishioners’ wishes. This happened so often, in fact, that the commissions given papal legates and nuncios regularly included the power to dispense clerics from the irregularity they fell into by giving the nuptial blessing at second marriages.73 The work of Jean-Baptiste Molin and Protais Mutembe on marriage rituals in France offers further evidence of the importance of the nuptial blessing. In northern France, priests seeking to avoid incurring irregularity and to appease their parishioners conferred different blessings to replace the forbidden one and recited the new benediction at a different point in the ritual.74
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