long he stayed away. Wives who nevertheless remarried by means of false testimony or some other manner were concubines and their children bastards.83
To return to canon law and to commentary, canonists commenting on the decretals offered a range of views on remarriage, but they generally agreed that full proof posed too heavy a burden for spouses with absent partners and allowed remarriage on a presumption, ideally one adjudicated in court and with a judge’s assessment of the likelihood of life or death. According to these commentators and as found in the most important commentary, the Glossa ordinaria, a reasonable presumption of death was all that was necessary to allow for remarriage. Hostiensis, perhaps the most celebrated canonist of the thirteenth century (c. 1200–1271) and a most “humane” scholar,84 offered a practical, flexible, and compassionate interpretation of the laws in his Summa aurea, arguing that a reasonable presumption of the death of a first husband was all that should be required for a second marriage, which arrived when it was generally believed that the first husband had perished.85 Hostiensis recognized that not everyone agreed with this view but maintained that he was more nearly correct than they. Nevertheless, in the Lectura, written later in life (1270–71), Hostiensis warned strongly against remarriage without sufficient cause to presume an absent spouse had died.86
In the fifteenth century we find a voice of dissent. Nicolao de Tedeschi (1386–1445), bishop of Naples and an extremely influential canonist known as Panormitanus, required evidence for remarriage in the strictest of terms. In calling for a “certificate of death,” Panormitanus insisted that canon law should not ever presume that a missing person has died. Instead, the law should presume that a person will live a hundred years.87 Perhaps once a missing spouse’s hundredth birthday had passed, any surviving spouse might then remarry. If something of an outlier among the commentators, the strict requirement offered by Panormitanus had its advocates in the realm of local law and legal practice.
Let us turn now to local law. However important these works of legal commentary such as the Glossa ordinaria or the work of Hostiensis might be to the minds of canonists, their efforts at mitigating the strict rules for remarriage were either unknown or discounted in the making of synodal statutes in much of northern France and in Burgundian lands. As found beginning in the thirteenth century, the diocesan legislation of northern France handled the question of remarriage with far more severity than that proposed in much of the classical, central canon law texts, and certainly with much more severity than found in much of the commentary written on these laws.
Thus the statutes of Rouen, Paris, Cambrai, and Troyes required documentation attesting to the marital status of anyone who had previously lived in a different parish or diocese from the one in which they wished to marry.88 The fourteenth-century statutes of the diocese of Troyes prohibited remarriage without first providing proof of death, which required a great deal more than a “reasonable presumption of death.89 In both places, men and women found to have violated these rules regularly faced fines.90
In the records from local courts in other parts of Europe, further evidence of such a firm line on remarriage does not emerge with any consistency. One fifteenth-century court exhibits if anything the reverse attitude to that found in Troyes. In southern Germany, in the diocese of Regensburg, not only did the officiality not subject bigamists to public punishment or imprisonment, but men and women who approached the court seeking permission to remarry—or even to stay married despite being already married to an absent spouse—received explicit permission from the official to do so.91 In England and Italy, while courts did not go so far as to grant permission to remarry without proof, the courts seemed on the whole to handle remarriage with a policy of “don’t ask don’t tell,” a policy that often continued well into the sixteenth century.92 Those married to an absent spouse simply—and not necessarily quietly—remarried, and the court asked no questions unless a suit was brought to challenge the legitimacy of the marriage because of a prior bond. Emlyn Eisenach has found remarkably overt abuse of the canon law governing remarriage in Verona, practices that ended in the 1520s, when regulation of remarriage and prosecution of bigamy began at the instigation of a reforming bishop.93 These differences in both practice and court proceedings concerning remarriage in the fifteenth century, with Regensburg and Troyes at opposite extremes in legal practice, offer some indication of the range of ways in which ecclesiastical courts in fifteenth-century Europe implemented marriage law. At the same time, the evidence of different social attitudes toward remarriage at some, usually lower, levels of society in Verona and Venice may well be indicative of much broader social practice in other parts of Europe.
Even within northern France and Burgundian lands, courts did not see fit always and everywhere to require proof of death before allowing a remarriage. Emmanuël Falzone found one case from Cambrai in which a married woman approached the court seeking permission to remarry.94 On 22 September 1452 Renaude Coppine, the wife of Pierre, had not seen Pierre in two years and wished to remarry. Pierre had left on pilgrimage to Rome but had not returned. In order to prove that Renaude could claim the status of a widow, the official ordered the announcement of banns, designed to seek out any evidence that Pierre lived. If no objections were made, Renaude could be permitted to remarry.
We find a similar practice in one case from Rouen, examined in Carole Avignon’s dissertation. In 1520, two wives who claimed their husbands had abandoned them wished to remarry and approached the official. The official ordered that the parish priests of each man should issue summons during mass for three successive Sundays, calling for the missing husbands to present themselves. If the men themselves or some news of their status did not emerge, the two women could remarry.95
Such a handling of remarriage may have had deep roots in France. A comparable practice is found in Gautier d’Arras’s twelfth-century story “Ille et Galeron,”96 a tale dedicated to a second wife, Beatrix, the wife of Frederick Barbarossa. In that tale the pope wishes the valiant Ille to marry the emperor’s daughter in Rome, but Ille demurs on the grounds that he is already married to the absent (but really not at all far off) Galeron. The pope then orders that a summons seeking Galeron be issued in Galeron’s home diocese. No trace of Galeron is found, Ille agrees to remarry, and the marriage is only prevented (temporarily) by the arrival of Galeron at the door of St. Peter’s on the wedding day.
If Gautier d’Arras, and much more to the point, Hostiensis—along with most canon law commentators—and the officials of Cambrai and Rouen all found such a procedure satisfactory, however, the official in Troyes did not, and this “new” attitude found in Troyes would slowly come to prevail in the Catholic countries of the sixteenth century. A similar attitude can be found in the records of the Paris officiality, in at least one case. In 1500, one Marguerite came before the court seeking permission to remarry. She claimed to be the wife of a long-absent husband who had left her, gone to London, married another woman and had children with her, and died. In this case, Marguerite produced two witnesses to her husband’s death in hopes that she could receive permission to remarry.97 The scholarship of Charles Donahue, Ruth Karras, and Léon Pommeray on Paris reveals similar cases, as well as the prosecution of those who failed to find proof before remarriage.98
This strict regulation of remarriage also extended to include harsh punishment, or at least the threat of it. The real seriousness with which some courts, at least, viewed bigamy is demonstrated by the prescribed treatment of those found to have seriously violated the law. In some statute collections we find specified punishments for those who willfully married despite being already married. Deemed “infamous” in Roman legal tradition,99 their infamy, their status as infamous, was to be displayed to the public by exposing them upon the ladder of the scaffold. A crime committed against the public, as the underlying logic explained, required public punishment, public acknowledgment, and expiation of the wrongdoing.
To offer two examples, the thirteenth-century synodal statutes of the diocese of Tours and the statutes of the neighboring northwestern diocese, Château-Gontier, threatened those guilty of double
