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c h a p t e r 4 Why Commit Bigamy? Men and women alike committed bigamy in late medieval Troyes. Whether abandoned or abandoning, separated by circumstance or design, by mutual consent or a unilateral desertion, men and women who found themselves at some distance from their spouses found new spouses to marry. Subsequently, at least some of these men and women found themselves at odds with ecclesiastical courts. The scattered surviving court registers include records of these proceedings for modern scholars to puzzle over, and scholars have identified and analyzed bigamy cases found across medieval Europe.1 However, none of these scholars offer much by way of explanation of why late medieval men and women committed bigamy. Why commit bigamy? In the fifteenth-century diocese of Troyes, at least, one did so at great risk. The bishops and ecclesiastical officials of Troyes, in addition to at least some law-abiding parish priests, made a sustained effort to prevent bigamous marriages throughout the fifteenth century. Certainly, many bigamously married couples may well have managed to avoid prosecution . We do not know how often bigamists accomplished their second, illegal marriages without coming to the attention of the court, and we have no way of assessing how often bigamists were caught or not. However, we have seen how spectacularly and harshly those men found guilty of bigamy were punished, a public example to all who might attempt to marry despite being already married. The possible consequences for such behavior were clear, proclaimed by the diocesan officials in the subjection of convicted bigamists to public punishment on the ladder of the scaffold. Additionally , court officials confined bigamists to prison, dissolved their second, bigamous marriages, and upon release from prison ordered these men and women to return to their first and only lawful spouses, on penalty of a return to confinement. With such risks, why commit bigamy? Even without such 96 chapter 4 risks, why marry when already married to a living spouse? What was there to gain in remarriage? Having examined the behavior of male and female bigamists in previous chapters, in this chapter I ask why these men and women remarried when already married to a living spouse. As I will argue, based on the evidence we have, the best explanation I can offer has much more to do with theology and with the culture of marriage in late medieval Troyes than with any other reasons. Before coming to that explanation, however, I will review the existing scholarship on bigamy and explore other possible explanations for these behaviors. The picture of the practice of bigamy that we can garner from prior scholarship offers a mixed and complex account of very different court practices and marital behavior. We know that people seem to have gone about bigamy in different ways, and we certainly know that courts handled it in different ways. Nevertheless, we are left with few ideas as to why medieval people committed bigamy. English and Italian sources, for example, include a large number of bigamy cases processed on quite different terms than those found in northern France. Modern scholars, following Donahue and Helmholz, usually describe English and Italian cases involving double marriages as pre-contract or threeparty cases.2 In cases of this type, one party alleged that two marriages (or engagements) took place; that is to say, one of the parties bound him- or herself to two spouses. The court then determined which union, if any, took precedence and dissolved any second, and therefore invalid, union. Shannon McSheffrey located a large number of such bigamy prosecutions in England, but as she herself argues through some fascinating detective work, these cases are far from what they seem on the surface. While the cases she examined from fifteenth-century London turned on the allegation of a bigamous marriage , this first marriage was often a convenient fiction, offered up to the court in hopes that the court would dissolve the “second” or in any case no longer desirable marriage. Such “confessions” of bigamy, found in both English and Italian court records, reek of fraud.3 Often enough in these cases, the alleged first spouse had (conveniently) died, leaving those in the “second” and therefore invalid marriage free to take new spouses.4 In fact, in these English and Italian cases the ban on bigamy seems to have done the same sort of service for these nonnoble men and women that the ban on incestuous marriage did for nobles. As we saw in...

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