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Introduction

In the course of the final three centuries of the thousand-year period known as the European Middle Ages, between the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and the early decades of the sixteenth century, the Christian institution of marriage became at the same time an object of veneration and a source of deep concern. On the one hand, marriage became widely and intensely valued. Men and women at all levels of the social hierarchy married, and these marriages were treated as entrance into a respectable and pious stratum of society, sometimes referred to as the “order of matrimony,” or the order of married persons. This “order” was considered comparable, if not equivalent, to the holy orders of monks and nuns.¹

At the same time, as varied contemporary and especially sixteenth-century reports claim, the Christian institution of marriage underwent a considerable crisis at the end of the Middle Ages. The nature of that crisis, as found in northeastern France, is the subject of this book. Mine is far from the first modern book to discuss this crisis of marriage. Steven Ozment, to offer one example, describes the fifteenth century as a time in which the institutions of marriage and the family suffered greatly, largely because of the ways in which the Catholic Church handled marriage.² This book is premised, however, on the argument that Ozment and other scholars have misunderstood the nature of this crisis, at least as it emerged in northern France.

What indeed was this crisis of Christian marriage in the later Middle Ages? Ozment attributed the blame largely to the Catholic Church and its policies, which praised celibacy at the expense of marriage and the family and also espoused laws and legal practices that made marriage an unstable and disgraced business. Other scholars have different perceptions. In particular, most accounts have focused on the problem of “clandestine marriage.” From the time of Pope Alexander III (1159–81), Western Christians—as opposed to Byzantine—could marry on the basis of nothing more than an exchange of consent between a would-be husband and his wife. This meant that a couple, even a very young couple,³ could validly and indissolubly marry not only without the permission of their parents but also without any publicity or priestly participation. Simply making the declaration “I marry you” sufficed to create a lifelong marital bond, based upon the consent of the two spouses. The result of this “consensualist” marriage law, many scholars believe, was a crisis of parental and ecclesiastical control over marriage formation. If young Christians could enter into valid marriages by such exchanges of promises, this could only have greatest dangers for the authority of both families and the Church. Ozment argues that the writings of Protestant and Catholic reformers alike demonstrate the depth of the resulting crisis.

This book also considers this problem of clandestine marriage. However, as I shall argue, in fifteenth-century northern France, clandestine marriage was not the problem that caused a crisis, nor was it such a grave problem at all. The “crisis of marriage” in late medieval northern France was not in fact an outbreak of young Romeos and Juliets engaging in illicit romances. The fifteenth-century court records studied in this book do not reveal a widespread practice of runaway youths engaging in secret marriages. They do not reveal an ecclesiastical court overwhelmed by concern over clandestine marriage practices, nor do they reveal the malcontent of parents whose children married against their wishes.

Instead, those records document a different problem. They document the practice and prosecution of men and women who, already married to living spouses, attempt to marry again. Moreover, many of these marriages took place in public and with a priest’s blessing. Clandestine marriage was simply not at issue in the prosecution of matrimonial offenses that mattered most to church court officials in Troyes, the diocese that is the primary focus of this book. The crisis of marriage at the end of the Middle Ages, at least as found in northern France, was not a conflict over parental control—though it was, in a sense, a battle over ecclesiastical control. It was, at core, a crisis about the legal requirement that marriage must be a monogamous and indissoluble bond, about the high and holy status accorded monogamy. This crisis emerged as a conflict between laity, on the one hand, who valued marriage so much that they wanted to marry even if already married to a no-longer desired spouse, and, on the other hand, ecclesiastical officials, who valued marriage as a sacrament and considered illegal remarriage an intolerable abuse of this sacrament.

To understand the depth of this crisis, we must begin by understanding the strength of the Christian commitment to marriage as a holy monogamy. Both indissolubility and monogamy were central to the problems of Christian marriage law as applied in much of medieval Europe. Christian doctrine prized monogamy above all, insisting that a Christian marriage could not involve more than two spouses. According to this doctrine, no Christian could be married to more than one living spouse at once. Additionally, divorce was forbidden. Christian marriage, once made, could only end with the death of a spouse.

Indeed, Christian custom disdained even remarriage following the death of a spouse. Widows and widowers could remarry, but these marriages, while tolerated, were frowned upon. Even these lawful remarriages were thought to deviate from the ideal of marriage as a unique commitment made between one man and one woman. Further, beginning in the late twelfth century, canon law considerably restricted the numbers of those men and women who might technically claim widowed status. New laws proclaimed that no man or woman married to an absent spouse could be considered free to remarry unless they could prove in court that this absent spouse had died. By the later Middle Ages these laws were enforced in at least some dioceses.

By the later Middle Ages, however, Christian society had made so much of marriage that many previously married people were determined to marry a new partner even if they broke the law in so doing. They wished to partake of the wide range of spiritual and social benefits marriage bestowed upon a wedded couple. However, they could not legally marry because they were already married to a living—if absent or otherwise undesirable—spouse. That these men and women could not legally marry, however, does not mean that they did not marry.

The consequence of this conflict between social practice and the law was an epidemic of illegal marriages in northern France. In marrying despite being already married, men and women of the later Middle Ages committed a crime I will somewhat anachronistically refer to as bigamy, for reasons explained in the next chapter.⁴ As a result of this widespread behavior, I argue, bigamy became a matter of grave concern.

Earliest evidence is found in the fifteenth century, in northern France and in Burgundian lands, and this book will focus on these earliest surviving sources. In the dioceses of Paris, Rouen, Cambrai, Châlons-en-Champagne, and most notably Troyes, local ecclesiastical officials made determined efforts to prevent and punish these illegal remarriages. Based on the current scholarship on ecclesiastical proceedings in other regions of medieval Europe, it appears that northern France stands out as exceptional in this regard. In England, Italy, southern France, southern Germany, and Spain, scholars have so far identified no such efforts at regulating marriage in the fifteenth century, and certainly not to the same degree or with the same emphasis on punishment as found in Troyes.⁵

This apparent exceptionalism of northern France does need to be qualified, though, and for reasons that will be explored further below.⁶ Even if we retain the assumption that Troyes was unusual, however, that does not mean that it is unimportant for an understanding of the development of Christian marriage law and practice or undeserving of study. This is true for two reasons. First, if the law as applied in practice in northern France was different, the law on the books was not. The courts in northern France—and that of Troyes in particular—were enforcing the rules established in canon law that all these places had in common, even if most courts did not implement them. By studying Troyes, we can learn something of real importance about what it means to put law into practice. Second, and perhaps more significant, what was possibly or even probably exceptional in the fifteenth century unquestionably became the rule in the sixteenth century, at least in Catholic lands.

Indeed, the issue of how to reconcile popular marriage practice with ecclesiastical requirements for Christian marriage and especially remarriage did not die with the end of the Middle Ages. Some of the most striking evidence for the character of the late medieval crisis of marriage emerges from sixteenth-century sources. The matter seemed so pressing to the Church hierarchy as a whole that they took it up at the Council of Trent (1545–64). At that fundamental council, Church officials decided to alter the laws of marriage radically, and for the explicit reason of preventing bigamy. Previously, couples could lawfully and indissolubly marry by the exchange of consent, with no need for publicity, parental consent, or the blessing of a priest. The Decree Tametsi of the Council of Trent (1563) finally abolished clandestine marriages, proclaiming that no Christian could legitimately marry without the participation of a priest and with banns announced beforehand.⁷ Any marriage made without these precautions was invalid and nonbinding.

The Catholic officials of the Counter Reformation did not make this decision, as previous scholarship has suggested, because of a concern over couples like Romeo and Juliet, who had so disastrously married in secret. Catholic leaders made their decision, as explained in the text of the decree, because of the great problem of bigamy, a problem found not only in northern France. Too many men and women, the text decreed, despite being already married to a living spouse, were taking additional spouses. Such behavior was too grave a threat to Christian society to be tolerated. Throughout the sixteenth century and beyond, prosecutions of bigamy took a prominent role in judicial proceedings across Catholic Europe and in the New World.⁸

The purpose of this book is to take that declaration from the Decree Tametsi at face value. Scholars have paid too little attention to the stated reason for the prevention of bigamy given in this decree. As a result, they have first not recognized that bigamy was perceived as a problem in medieval society, and second they have misunderstood the reasons why bigamy was the subject of widespread prosecutions in subsequent centuries. By studying the beginnings of this practice and prosecution as found in northern France, I thus call for a broad reconsideration of the history of Christian marriage as Europe emerged from the Middle Ages.

This reading of the meaning of bigamy also aims to force a reconsideration of the idea of identity and its relationship to criminal prosecution in the sixteenth century. Over the last forty years, scholars of early modern Europe have focused on the role of identity in pre-modern culture. Natalie Davis has made the widely embraced argument that the problem with a crime such as bigamy, or passing as the husband of another man’s wife—as in the case of The Return of Martin Guerre—was a problem of identity, of imposture and fraud.⁹ An attempt to so distort identity grievously offended a world as preoccupied with status and honor as early modern Europe. Davis’s Return of Martin Guerre is undoubtedly the most famous book related to the problem of bigamy known to most modern readers, and it may seem natural to apply Davis’s interpretive approach to the cases of bigamy found in my study.

It is my contention, however, that identity in the sense in which scholars influenced by Davis use the term was not what the crime of bigamy was about, at least not in the fifteenth century and probably not in the sixteenth century either. The problem with the crime of bigamy was different, at least at that time. Bigamy was viewed with such horror for reasons that had to do with theology, with Christian identity rather than identity alone. As a contemporary editor of Voltaire’s encyclopedia remarked in expanding on the entry “polygamy,” bigamy and polygamy were viewed with horror in Christian society “because of the sacrament [of marriage].”¹⁰ The Catholic tradition insisted that marriage, as a sacramental sign of the exclusive and indissoluble union of Christ with the Church, had to be monogamous and binding. Bigamy was not a violation of norms of early modern identity but a violation of Christian identity, an unchristian act. In this book I address these issues by seeking out an understanding of the meaning and function of marriage in late medieval Christian theology, law, culture, society, and legal practice. I aim in particular to understand the role of bigamy in these developments, treating bigamy as the negation of the monogamy inherent in a Christian understanding of what marriage should be.

This book begins with an exploration of the place of bigamy in medieval law, theology, and culture. 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.