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c h a p t e r 2 Bigamous Husbands Between 1423 and 1468, the officiality of Troyes convicted twenty men including one Franciscan friar for the crime of willfully marrying “de facto, cum de jure non posset”; in fact only, as not legally permissible. Who were these men, and why did the court in Troyes prosecute them? The second half of that question is a more appropriate topic for Chapter 5, “Why Prosecute Bigamy?” In this chapter we will seek out what information we can gather about who these men were, what common identity, if any, they shared, and what about them as a group led to their denunciation, prosecution, and conviction. Learning as much as we can about the men prosecuted and convicted for bigamy will thus further inform our reading, in the final chapter, of why the court chose to prosecute these men in particular. Almost all of the information we have about these men is drawn from the sentences passed against them by the court. Indeed, the court’s record of the sentence is usually the only opportunity we have to encounter these men in the sources; almost no other surviving records offer any information about them. As with the sentence passed against Étienne “Languedoc” described at the close of the previous chapter, these sentences gave the date, listed the court officials present at the sentencing, and then proceeded to describe the convicted bigamist and some details of the first and second marriages. These sentences declared that two marriages had taken place during the lifetime of a first spouse and that the bigamist either did not seek out proof of death or else provided fraudulent proof before remarrying. Such, it seems, was sufficient to define a crime. We have, then, usually, at least that much information to work with. Some of the sentences offer more details than others. A few sentences provide information about where the first wife resided at the time of prosecution; others mention children born to the first or second marriages, or both. All of this 50 chapter 2 contributes to a rough understanding of who these men were and how they came to marry twice. These records can offer important clues about these men, how they set about marrying and remarrying, and the deeper questions of why they acted as they had, and why the court responded as it did. To begin with a caveat, accepting the information provided in these sentences as true or factual requires something of a leap of faith. It is quite possible that these men lied to the court. They may have lied about where they were from, about their names, and also about the details of their prior marital histories. After all, these men had almost all attempted to pass themselves off as widowers, or in any case as men free to marry, while in reality they had a living wife, occasionally children, and other familial and social ties that they had concealed. They are patently not a class of inherently trustworthy witnesses to their own activities. How to correct for further potential falsehoods in their “confessions” of bigamy? In point of fact, it is hard to say what scholars might do to extract “truth” from these records. In dealing with this problem, which makes it difficult to study either testimony or litigation, we must follow the example of John Arnold in his critical reading of the sorts of stories told to inquisitorial judges.1 We must read these legal depositions more as a source of narrative, of carefully constructed narrative , than fact. A man might claim he had married seven years before in Chartres and have in fact married ten years before in Paris. We must do our best with what information we have. If that information is not a true rendering of events, it does at least show the sorts of narratives that the men being punished by the officiality told about themselves or that the court had garnered in interrogating witnesses and collecting depositions. We can additionally read these records on the presumption that the information contained therein is at least plausible, if not the whole truth. These men probably did not venture too far afield from what would have made for a plausible life history in late medieval Champagne. That said, let us begin our analysis and categorization of the twenty men convicted of “de facto” marriages. We can set one man apart from the beginning . Nineteen of the men were still...

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