Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne

Chapter 1. Marriage and Remarriage in the Later Middle Ages: Law, Theology, and Culture

c h a p t e r 1 Marriage and Remarriage in the Later Middle Ages Law, Theology, and Culture The fifteenth-century registers of the Bishop of Troyes’s judicial court tell a strange story.1 Amid the destruction and chaos of the Hundred Years’ War, in the Champagne region of northeastern France people were marrying more often than the law permitted. More curious still, in the course of concerted efforts to restore order in the diocese, the bishop’s judicial court investigated and prosecuted many of these oft-married men and women, detaining them in the bishop’s prison in the course of an investigation and fining the largest number of offenders. Those found to have willfully violated the law in their mode of marrying (almost all men) the court subjected to public punishment and lengthy imprisonment. That such prosecutions took place at all, let alone with such vigor, will surprise many historians of medieval and early modern France. Historians have not recognized how interventionist northern French church courts could be in matters of remarriage. To be sure, scholars who study the records of local church courts, called officialities, have begun to recognize that northern France served as host to unusually proactive and regulatory ecclesiastical courts.2 But we have not understood two central factors of this regulatory behavior: we have recognized neither the importance of remarriage in this context nor how energetically these courts, and the diocesan court of Troyes in particular, acted to prevent and prosecute bigamy. My purpose in this chapter is to situate the reader in the legal, theological , cultural, and social context of marriage and remarriage at the end of the Middle Ages, as background to the court action that took place in 10 chapter 1 fifteenth-century Troyes. Beginning with some of the major historiographical trends, I then turn to the theological and legal rules for marriage and marriage symbolism in particular, studying the impact of these rules in late medieval law, court practice, and society. I close with a description of the surviving court records of the officiality of Troyes, the principal sources for this book, and an initial analysis of the bigamy cases found in the these records. We have known for some time that marriage arrived at something of a crisis point at the end of the Middle Ages. We have known this not least because postmedieval sources say so with such vehemence. For somehow the sixteenth century bursts forth with complaints, criticisms, and the most radical solutions to seemingly all-consuming problems with marriage—problems not only with the canon law of marriage itself and the ecclesiastical courts charged with implementing these rules but also with the behavior of ordinary Christians who married in ways that offended ecclesiastics, theologians, jurists, and reformers of all stripes on both sides of a growing confessional divide.3 What was this crisis about? If the rules governing Christian marriage were to blame, scholarship on medieval law and the family has suggested two possibilities : incest prohibitions and clandestine marriage. This book will offer a third: remarriage. To begin with incest prohibitions, it might seem natural to suppose that the medieval Church’s infamously expansive prohibitions on marriage between those related by blood, marriage, or spiritual bonds were the principal source of the crisis. In fact, there was a time when many scholars described these incest prohibitions as one of the most burning issues of medieval marriage litigation. Out of all of these rules and regulations that emerged in the Christian Middle Ages, those concerning consanguinity, or blood ties, were long considered the most important aspect of medieval marriage formation and dissolution.4 In particular, the prominent and influential scholars Jack Goody and Georges Duby occupied themselves greatly with explaining and emphasizing medieval concerns over incestuous marriage.5 One can certainly understand why these scholars focused on consanguinity prohibitions and their role in western European marriage practices. Medieval canon law and theological writings offer a wealth of discussion on forbidden, incestuous marriages , accompanied by genealogical trees depicting kinship and expressions of horror over the monstrous children incestuous unions might produce. If we measure the importance of a topic by the sheer volume of treatment in known medieval canonical and theological sources, there is hardly any doubt that the rules on prohibited relationships were of fundamental importance. Moreover, the forbidden degrees of relationship are also natural subjects Marriage and Remarriage 11 for litigation...