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Reviewed by:
  • Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne by Sara McDougall
  • Ellen Kittell
Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne. By Sara McDougall. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Pp. 216. $55.00 (cloth).

This monograph, focusing on bigamy in the French county of Champagne during the fifteenth century, represents Sara McDougall’s contribution to the very lively discussion of the late medieval “marriage crisis.” For McDougall, bigamy was not a sign of a cavalier attitude toward marriage but rather the opposite. Through in-depth analyses of the historical and anthropological contexts of medieval marriage, and based on records from the diocesan court of Troyes, she argues that laypeople understood and valued the sacrament. To achieve religiously sanctioned marriage, bigamists might conveniently forget previous espousals, bribe priests, and even commit perjury. Church courts might in turn, as in Troyes, prosecute, convict, and punish them with fines or with humiliating exposure on the ladder to the scaffold.

According to McDougall, men found the risk worth taking. The episcopal registers of Troyes provide evidence for “over a hundred” investigations of alleged bigamy (5). Those prosecuted did not come from the upper classes but instead were barbers, clerks, and linen weavers. They were typically older, nonlocal men. Examples, such as that of Barthélémy Bouvier (who went to great lengths to marry Jeannette, a wealthy widow, despite the fact that he was still married to a very much alive Paquette Gareva), animate her analysis and make these people and their marital problems more real. Having examined “bigamous husbands,” McDougall turns to “abandoned wives.” Church courts, it turns out, treated women with two husbands more leniently than their male counterparts. Evidently, bigamously married women were felt to be only slightly less problematic than unmarried ones.

I am not sure, however, that McDougall’s thesis needs proving. That there was so much marriage litigation is itself evidence that medieval Europeans believed in marriage, although, admittedly, distinguishing spirituality [End Page 493] from mere conformity is difficult. A correlated problem is the strain of linking bigamy so strongly to Christian identity. Identity is defined not only by what one is but also by what one is not. For medieval northern France, there was no alternative to Christian culture and thus to “Christian” marriage. There was only “marriage” and “adultery.”

The book reads like a dissertation rewritten for publication, presupposing familiarity with the material and the debate. McDougall strives in her first chapter to situate bigamy within a broad variety of discourses through which one might make sense of the swamp that was late medieval marriage; these include ritual practices from nuptial blessings to solemnization, incest prohibitions, the text of canon law, and the backgrounds of the court officials who interpreted it. At some point, however, it all became so confusing that I had to seek clarification elsewhere—specifically in Charles Donahue’s Law, Marriage, and Society in the Later Middle Ages.1 The map I eventually had to Google cleared up a number of confusing points. A table of those “over a hundred” bigamy cases, including variables such as person, date, type of case, presiding official, and result, would have provided an efficient, concise visual reference for her analyses. To be sure, there is one table (106), but nonspecialists are likely to find it problematic. It has no title, provides no organizational headings, and includes no dates nor any explanation of terms or abbreviations.

If, as I suspect, given Donahue’s analysis, most cases in Troyes were office cases (ones initiated by church court), the focus shifts from the intent of the alleged bigamist to what McDougall describes as the “massive effort to police marriage practice” (7). If the sentences are wholly the work of the court, the question of intent has already been decided: each guilty person ipso facto had foreknowledge and intended to commit the misdeed of which she or he is accused. This record tells us more about the official clerical position toward marriage than it does about lay attitudes. McDougall thus confuses forced conformity to the church courts with personal spirituality. Her reasoning about why the diocesan court picked on mature men is regrettably incomplete...

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