Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne. Sara McDougall
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required the Church to change its policies. Clandestine marriage could no longer be allowed because of “those parties who live on in a state of damnation, when, having left their former wife, with whom they had contracted marriage secretly, they publicly marry another, and with her live in perpetual adultery.”34
Out of all of the objections to the canon law of marriage voiced in the sixteenth century, this decree comes closest to describing what the fifteenth-century problem with marriage actually was. Even this ban on clandestine marriage—a ban established because informality could conceal an act of bigamy—does not precisely describe the fundamental cause of the crisis of marriage found in fifteenth-century sources. In northern France, at least, the problem was not so much that people were marrying in secret but that they were marrying and remarrying in public, with the Church’s blessing. They also married and remarried in secret, but the problem was the remarriage itself much more than how publicly or privately the remarriage was made.
This book traces the developing crisis over remarriage as found in fifteenth-century northeastern France, with some reference to the rest of northern France and Burgundian territories. Focusing on this region rather than making a broader geographical study may seem an artificial means to discuss a much larger and more diverse situation of marriage at the end of the Middle Ages. But one of the most important aspects of this crisis of marriage is that it only manifested as crisis, only existed, only mattered, in such places and times as the law on indissolubility and the ban on bigamous marriages was implemented.
Looking to the surviving ecclesiastical court records of northern France, we find evidence of considerable efforts on the part of diocesan officials to prevent marriages made otherwise than with banns and the public blessing of the match by a priest. We also find a large number of cases in which men and women made public and blessed marriages but in which the courts subsequently dissolved or cast into a sort of legal limbo the legitimacy of these marriages. These courts took this drastic step because one or the other spouse had failed to prove their freedom from prior marriage bonds. Finally, the registers of the officiality of Troyes reveal a remarkable number of cases in which men and women found to have willfully married despite being already married faced harsh public punishment and imprisonment for this act of double marriage, a crime we would call bigamy.
It must be emphasized once more that nothing like this crackdown on bigamy is known to have taken place elsewhere in Christian lands before the sixteenth century. Certainly we find the threat of such punishments in ecclesiastical and secular legislation as early as the thirteenth century. It is, however, one thing to threaten people with such punishments, but quite another thing to actually impose it.
In fifteenth-century Troyes, such punishments were actually imposed. Whatever problems clandestine marriage may have caused in fifteenth-century Troyes, bigamy was considered a far more grave problem. As Beatrice Gottlieb, the first scholar to make a full-scale study of marriage litigation in fifteenth-century Troyes and neighboring Châlons-en-Champagne, wrote: “[Bigamy] was unquestionably the worst of all the offenses related to marriage and sex, as can be seen from the penalty … Clandestine marriage, no matter what form it took [in a chapel, at a tavern, using words of the present or future tense] was regarded as less reprehensible.”35
Having identified as the central cause of crisis this conflict over remarriage, which in the diocese of Troyes resulted in the prosecution of bigamy, we must also ask why. Why did northern French courts make such efforts to regulate marriage? Why did northern French couples marry and remarry so often in the first place? Why did marriage matter so much, to the ecclesiastical officials and to the men and women who married and remarried?
We cannot understand this behavior without extensive recourse to law and to theology extending far back before the fifteenth century. Actual records of prosecution emerge only from the surviving sources of the later Middle Ages, but laws against bigamy date back to antiquity. We must also immerse ourselves not only in what is sometimes referred to as the legal culture of a court and community but also in the culture of the community more broadly. We must understand what marriage meant in late medieval Troyes, as found in its laws, its theological traditions, and its culture, high and low. We must, in short, understand the place of bigamy within the Christian tradition. The role of bigamy and of the laws prohibiting it in the Middle Ages has received little scholarly attention. It is, however, of fundamental importance, both for an understanding of marriage in the later Middle Ages and for the history of marriage in the West.
The exaltation of monogamy and the ban on bigamy proved central tenets of Christian identity at the end of the Middle Ages, but their origins trace back far earlier. Bigamy was important above all because monogamy was so important to Christian marriage and to Christian identity, identity as defined by the Church Fathers in late antiquity and their Western successors. It is important to emphasize that the ideal of monogamy, central to the Christian definition of marriage, had a tremendous impact not only on married couples but also on clergy. The symbolic power of the ideal of monogamy played a role in all manner of vows and obligations. Many different status and societal relationships were symbolically understood as marriages, and all marriages had to emulate the model, monogamous marriages of Adam and Eve and Christ and the Church, about which a great deal more follows.
Recent scholarship, most notably that of David d’Avray, has shown the importance of marriage symbolism in medieval law and theology and its dissemination in medieval society.36 As I argue, this marriage symbolism also played a central role in the practice and prosecution of those Christians who married while already married to a living spouse. Indeed, such double marriages shook this symbolism at its core. The ecclesiastical court and perhaps even the community understood few other actions taken by a married person as such a challenge to the fundamentals of Christian marriage, its core values of monogamy and indissolubility.
In the Christian tradition, remarriage in any form was a problematic act. Christians were, in principle, supposed to marry only once. This rule applied both to laity and to clergy, and to all forms of remarriage: successive, concurrent, and figurative. Marriage was always ideally a singular and exclusive event. We gain a great deal in recognizing the ways in which the symbolic nature of all of these forms of marriage derived from the same roots.
The Christian tradition set forth two models for what Christian marriage should be, one from the Old Testament and one from the New. First, marriage had to resemble the union of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. As recounted in the Book of Genesis, God created Eve from one of Adam’s ribs and joined the couple together, in a phrase constantly repeated throughout the Middle Ages, as “two in one flesh.”37 This first model marriage, instituted in paradise by God and blessed with the injunction “increase and multiply,” implied that Christians, if they could not live a life of sworn celibacy, should marry, one man to one woman, chastely united as two in one flesh, as closely and inseparably joined as in the model marriage of Adam and Eve.
Christian marriage was to resemble not only the Old Testament model of Adam and Eve but also the New Testament model of the union of Christ and the Church. Here the key text was the fifth chapter of Ephesians, which instructed Christians to imitate God.38 In particular, Ephesians compared marriage between a man and a woman to the symbolic “marriage” of Christ and the Church. Both marriages, earthly and spiritual, required love and submission, with husbands the head of their wives just as Christ was the head of the Church. All those who married should follow the model of Christ and Church. As the Church married only Christ and no other gods, so too should Christians take only one spouse.
In late antiquity the Church Fathers drew upon both these models in forming a definition of marriage as an exclusive, monogamous bond, one that could not be divided and one that should not be repeated.39 Just as priests and monastics were to consecrate themselves to the Church in an indissoluble bond, so laypeople ought to consecrate themselves once, if at all, but only once, to a marriage. To quote Saint Jerome:
The creation of the first man should teach us to reject more marriages than one. There was but one Adam and but one Eve; in fact the woman was fashioned from a rib of Adam. Thus divided they were subsequently joined together in marriage; in the words of scripture “the twain shall be one flesh,” not two or three. “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall