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,