late medieval sources reveal any widespread problems with the exploitation of clandestine marriage as practiced to conceal a violation of one of the many incest prohibitions. Here again, recent research does not bear out the hypothesis that clandestine marriage—because of incest prohibitions—was the burning issue.
In point of fact, it was not clandestine marriage but remarriage, as this book will demonstrate, that was the great and burning problem that led to crisis. Inevitably, the canon law of marriage created immense difficulties for abandoned or confused spouses scattered throughout western Europe. In such circumstances, it could be difficult indeed to prove that an absent or reluctant spouse was indeed your spouse. Moreover, remarriage compounded the problem, as many of those men and women entered into new unions, doing so both clandestinely and also publicly. As Church officials themselves recognized, Christians married all too often, binding themselves first to one and then to another spouse and sometimes even yet another, marrying more times than legally possible.
Clandestine marriage certainly played a part. The Church’s own rules on marriage formation contrasted sharply with the rules that virtually prohibited both dissolving any valid marriage and supplementing another spouse while a first lived. The disparity between the ease with which people could marry and the absolute refusal to allow any person, once married, to take another spouse while the first spouse lived set up a stark conflict. It meant in principle that people could easily enter into marriages they might later want to escape, and also that they could easily enter into second marriages despite being already committed elsewhere. This was precisely the objection to clandestine marriage that we find in the mid-sixteenth century at the Council of Trent, which finally declared clandestine marriage invalid. Despite the belief that consent alone made a marriage, man’s bad behavior, “man’s disobedience,” required the Church to change its policies. Clandestine marriage could no longer be allowed because of “those parties who live on in a state of damnation, when, having left their former wife, with whom they had contracted marriage secretly, they publicly marry another, and with her live in perpetual adultery.”34
Out of all of the objections to the canon law of marriage voiced in the sixteenth century, this decree comes closest to describing what the fifteenth-century problem with marriage actually was. Even this ban on clandestine marriage—a ban established because informality could conceal an act of bigamy—does not precisely describe the fundamental cause of the crisis of marriage found in fifteenth-century sources. In northern France, at least, the problem was not so much that people were marrying in secret but that they were marrying and remarrying in public, with the Church’s blessing. They also married and remarried in secret, but the problem was the remarriage itself much more than how publicly or privately the remarriage was made.
This book traces the developing crisis over remarriage as found in fifteenth-century northeastern France, with some reference to the rest of northern France and Burgundian territories. Focusing on this region rather than making a broader geographical study may seem an artificial means to discuss a much larger and more diverse situation of marriage at the end of the Middle Ages. But one of the most important aspects of this crisis of marriage is that it only manifested as crisis, only existed, only mattered, in such places and times as the law on indissolubility and the ban on bigamous marriages was implemented.
Looking to the surviving ecclesiastical court records of northern France, we find evidence of considerable efforts on the part of diocesan officials to prevent marriages made otherwise than with banns and the public blessing of the match by a priest. We also find a large number of cases in which men and women made public and blessed marriages but in which the courts subsequently dissolved or cast into a sort of legal limbo the legitimacy of these marriages. These courts took this drastic step because one or the other spouse had failed to prove their freedom from prior marriage bonds. Finally, the registers of the officiality of Troyes reveal a remarkable number of cases in which men and women found to have willfully married despite being already married faced harsh public punishment and imprisonment for this act of double marriage, a crime we would call bigamy.
It must be emphasized once more that nothing like this crackdown on bigamy is known to have taken place elsewhere in Christian lands before the sixteenth century. Certainly we find the threat of such punishments in ecclesiastical and secular legislation as early as the thirteenth century. It is, however, one thing to threaten people with such punishments, but quite another thing to actually impose it.
In fifteenth-century Troyes, such punishments were actually imposed. Whatever problems clandestine marriage may have caused in fifteenth-century Troyes, bigamy was considered a far more grave problem. As Beatrice Gottlieb, the first scholar to make a full-scale study of marriage litigation in fifteenth-century Troyes and neighboring Châlons-en-Champagne, wrote: “[Bigamy] was unquestionably the worst of all the offenses related to marriage and sex, as can be seen from the penalty … Clandestine marriage, no matter what form it took [in a chapel, at a tavern, using words of the present or future tense] was regarded as less reprehensible.”35
Having identified as the central cause of crisis this conflict over remarriage, which in the diocese of Troyes resulted in the prosecution of bigamy, we must also ask why. Why did northern French courts make such efforts to regulate marriage? Why did northern French couples marry and remarry so often in the first place? Why did marriage matter so much, to the ecclesiastical officials and to the men and women who married and remarried?
We cannot understand this behavior without extensive recourse to law and to theology extending far back before the fifteenth century. Actual records of prosecution emerge only from the surviving sources of the later Middle Ages, but laws against bigamy date back to antiquity. We must also immerse ourselves not only in what is sometimes referred to as the legal culture of a court and community but also in the culture of the community more broadly. We must understand what marriage meant in late medieval Troyes, as found in its laws, its theological traditions, and its culture, high and low. We must, in short, understand the place of bigamy within the Christian tradition. The role of bigamy and of the laws prohibiting it in the Middle Ages has received little scholarly attention. It is, however, of fundamental importance, both for an understanding of marriage in the later Middle Ages and for the history of marriage in the West.
The exaltation of monogamy and the ban on bigamy proved central tenets of Christian identity at the end of the Middle Ages, but their origins trace back far earlier. Bigamy was important above all because monogamy was so important to Christian marriage and to Christian identity, identity as defined by the Church Fathers in late antiquity and their Western successors. It is important to emphasize that the ideal of monogamy, central to the Christian definition of marriage, had a tremendous impact not only on married couples but also on clergy. The symbolic power of the ideal of monogamy played a role in all manner of vows and obligations. Many different status and societal relationships were symbolically understood as marriages, and all marriages had to emulate the model, monogamous marriages of Adam and Eve and Christ and the Church, about which a great deal more follows.
Recent scholarship, most notably that of David d’Avray, has shown the importance of marriage symbolism in medieval law and theology and its dissemination in medieval society.36 As I argue, this marriage symbolism also played a central role in the practice and prosecution of those Christians who married while already married to a living spouse. Indeed, such double marriages shook this symbolism at its core. The ecclesiastical court and perhaps even the community understood few other actions taken by a married person as such a challenge to the fundamentals of Christian marriage, its core values of monogamy and indissolubility.
In the Christian tradition, remarriage in any form was a problematic act. Christians were, in principle, supposed to marry only once. This rule applied both to laity and to clergy, and to all forms of remarriage: successive, concurrent, and figurative. Marriage was always ideally a singular and exclusive event. We gain a great deal in recognizing the ways in which the symbolic nature of all of these forms of marriage derived from the same roots.
The Christian tradition set forth
