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Conclusion Christian Identity at the End of the Middle Ages Some thirty years ago Natalie Davis first enthralled the world with the story of Martin Guerre; his abandoned wife, Bertrande de Rols; the impostor Arnaud du Tilh, who assumed Martin’s identity; and the great Protestant jurist Jean de Coras, who judged the case. For Davis, the story brought to life the central issue of identity in early modern France. The imposture attempted by a man like du Tilh, Davis argued, violated a deeply held belief in the importance of identity, which was intimately bound up with personal status and honor.1 There is no gainsaying the brilliance of Davis’s work on Martin Guerre, nor of her continuing work on identity in early modern culture.2 Nevertheless , her ideas about identity have been stretched too far. Identity alone cannot explain all that scholars have subsequently asked it to explain. In particular, identity cannot explain the problem of bigamy as it manifested in northern France in the century before the celebrated trial of Arnaud de Tilh. To speak of identity in analyzing the cases studied in this book without speaking also, and more deeply, of Christianity and Christian identity is to misunderstand the meaning of bigamy in this context. To be sure, as practiced in late medieval northern France, the crime of bigamy by its very nature involved fraud and identity. Nevertheless, imposture was not the central issue in late medieval understandings of this crime. Distortions of identity undoubtedly mattered to the people of fifteenth-century Troyes. But it is Christian identity that mattered most. Whatever notions of honor and status men and women of fifteenth- and even sixteenth-century Troyes cherished, Christianity was no less prized and was intrinsically related to identity. Marriage, like baptism and burial, was a central Christian ritual in many people’s lives. How one married, to whom, and the subsequent conduct of married life were all essential acts of Christian identity. The bigamists of this book lived in a world in which Christian identity played a leading role. Monogamous marriage had supreme importance as the Christian norm, 136 conclusIon reverenced in late medieval Troyes. Indeed, the ideal of monogamous marriage held such importance that even widows and widowers who remarried faced considerable disapprobation and disapprobation of all kinds. Meanwhile, ecclesiastical courts in northern France implemented rules with such strict requirements for proof of widowed status that one wonders how even a legitimate widow might manage to establish her status without engaging in some bribery or fraud if her husband died anywhere other than in his own bed. As I have shown in this book, widows and widowers both valued marriage enough to engage in considerable lawbreaking. My aim here has been in part to demonstrate how sincere desire for Christian identity, for Christian status and honor as well as Christian benedictions, could drive such people to acts that the Christian church regarded as serious criminal acts. Drawing on the work of David d’Avray, we can assert that preaching served as an important tool for the dissemination of doctrinal Christian ideas about marriage in the later Middle Ages. Looking to the court records of the Troyes officiality, we find evidence of the dissemination of these ideas not only by preachers but also by priests and judicial officials, whose efforts to uphold Christian norms we read of in the registers. We find evidence for these activities in the records of the efforts of judicial officers to investigate and to prosecute those persons who violated the laws. We can also find also broad evidence of the presence of Christian marriage norms in the information offered the court by witnesses, suspects, denouncers , and accusers. The world of fifteenth-century Troyes was in many ways a very Christian world. Certainly the notion that marriage norms in late medieval Troyes offer evidence of a failed Christianization is entirely wrong. Christian ideas such as marital chastity or participation in the sacraments were valued and sought after. People forgot the lessons of Christian charity and fought each other, but they fought in church and in cemeteries. They were present and active, for better or worse, in sacred Christian space. Further, they fought largely to defend their sexual honor as upright Christians, married or not. Also, and what is more revealing, people married more often than they should have according to the law. But it matters that they did so at the doors of a church and with the blessing of the...

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