Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne by Sara McDougall (review)

This study of remarriage in the diocese of Troyes brings together the history of law, theology, and the family in order to illuminate the society of northern France in the fifteenth century. ‘Bigamy’ here refers to cases in which at least one of the partners in a marriage was still legally married to a previous spouse, thereby rendering the second marriage invalid and making it into an offence against the monogamous, sacramental concept of marriage expounded by medieval theologians and enforced by canon law. Whereas church courts elsewhere did not see bigamy as a particularly serious offence, the bishop’s court in fifteenth-century Troyes could severely punish those found guilty of it, thus anticipating attitudes and practices that were adopted throughout Catholic Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For Sara McDougall, it was the practice of remarriage, rather than clandestine marriage or incestuous marriage within prohibited degrees of consanguinity, that was the real problem for clerical conceptions of marriage in the later Middle Ages. According to McDougall, there was an ‘epidemic’ of illegal remarriages in late medieval France and thus a ‘crisis’ of marriage. Unfortunately, however, the number of cases involved in this epidemic is never clearly set out. We are told that hundreds or even thousands of men and women suspected of illegal relationships were ordered to quit each other’s company. However, since these relationships also included illegal cohabitation, fornication, adultery, and clerical concubinage, how many of them were actual cases of bigamy is unclear, particularly as clerical concubinage predominated among them. The ecclesiastical court registers are said to refer to ‘well over a hundred investigations’ of bigamy (p. 72), of which a hundred are examined here. Since the sources cover the period 1423–76, well over a hundred investigations of bigamy would thus seem to amount to two or three suspected cases a year. We are never given a figure for the population of the diocese of Troyes in the fifteenth century, but it is difficult to imagine that two or three cases (or suspected cases) of bigamy amounted either to an epidemic of illegal remarriage or to a crisis of marriage. Moreover, if the bishop’s officials were particularly proactive in seeking out such cases in the fifteenth century as part of a local crackdown on bigamy, it may be that the apparent frequency of invalid remarriages was actually a product of increased detection rather than a growth in its actual occurrence. Despite these quibbles, this study will appeal to all medievalists with an interest in legal, theological, and social history. Clearly written and logically structured, the book makes many important points about bigamy, medieval conceptions of marriage, and the varieties of regional practice to be found in church courts that were supposedly enforcing the same body of canon law. It deserves to find a wide audience and, hopefully, will inspire further studies of bigamy and its prosecution in other regions of late medieval Europe.