Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne. Sara McDougall
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do to extract “truth” from these records.
In dealing with this problem, which makes it difficult to study either testimony or litigation, we must follow the example of John Arnold in his critical reading of the sorts of stories told to inquisitorial judges.1 We must read these legal depositions more as a source of narrative, of carefully constructed narrative, than fact. A man might claim he had married seven years before in Chartres and have in fact married ten years before in Paris. We must do our best with what information we have. If that information is not a true rendering of events, it does at least show the sorts of narratives that the men being punished by the officiality told about themselves or that the court had garnered in interrogating witnesses and collecting depositions. We can additionally read these records on the presumption that the information contained therein is at least plausible, if not the whole truth. These men probably did not venture too far afield from what would have made for a plausible life history in late medieval Champagne.
That said, let us begin our analysis and categorization of the twenty men convicted of “de facto” marriages. We can set one man apart from the beginning. Nineteen of the men were still married to living wives at the time of their second marriages. One man, a friar and deacon, had abandoned his religious habit and the religious life in favor of matrimony,2 an act that canon law treated as a symbolic doubling of marriage vows. Married to the Church, he could not abandon his Spouse and marry a woman.3 For this crime he faced a year’s imprisonment. His punishment, notably, differed from the nineteen other men’s but matched that applied to the only woman convicted of bigamy, whose sentence is analyzed in the following chapter on abandoned wives. All the other convicted bigamists, all male, minor clergy and laity alike, faced both public punishment on the ladder of the scaffold and imprisonment. The friar’s case, which had very different motivations and issues than these other cases, we will exclude from the rest of the chapter and focus instead on the nineteen men who married twice.
Setting aside our friar, the other nineteen men also share something else in common. They seem to have limited their excessive marriage to bigamy rather than trigamy or more. While we have no cases of men who married more than two wives in succession from the officiality of Troyes, court records from other dioceses, such as those of Senlis and Paris, yield investigations of men alleged to have married three wives in succession.4 As for the bigamists in Troyes, in addition to the fact of bigamy, their most obvious shared characteristic was their gender.
What should we make of this clear predominance of men in the prosecution—and especially punishment—of bigamy? In a way it is not surprising that these men bore the brunt of the punishment, as men generally were the focus of late medieval justice.5 This does not mean, however, that we should not try for a deeper or more nuanced understanding of why men served as the main targets of this form of prosecution. After all, not all crimes were necessarily associated with male behavior. Some crimes had associations with female behavior, such as infanticide or witchcraft. Other crimes seemed to involve the regulation of both male and female activity.
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