excommunication and fines if they mounted charivaris against second marriages.65 Registers of the officiality of Troyes record fines levied, for example, against those who organized a charivari for the marriage of a widow.66 In all of these sources, the perception of the charivari is the same: it is a rite enacted in mockery of second marriages. What we have with charivari is thus a popular ritual enacted to shame those who married more than once.
There is a paradox in the efforts of the Church to prevent these disturbances. The Church sought to prevent charivari but was in some sense hampered by its own doctrinal practice, for it was confronting a form of social disorder that had emerged in response to its own teachings. To be sure, the Church had traditionally insisted that all marriages, even second marriages, be performed with solemnity.67 However, second marriages were hardly treated as equal to first marriages in theology and liturgy. The charivaris were thus related to the mixed message sent by the Church’s own doctrines, by which second marriages were declared to be at once licit and reprehensible.
Further, second marriages clearly stood out in that they were denied the nuptial blessing reserved for first marriages.68 Pope Alexander III and subsequent popes forbade priests officiating at second marriages to give the nuptial blessing. As Urban III wrote, “A man or a woman, going over into bigamy [in this case, entering into a successive marriage], should not be blessed by a priest, since, having been blessed on another [previous] occasion, their blessing ought not to be repeated.”69 Alexander III ordered that a chaplain who celebrated the nuptial blessing for a second marriage be suspended from his office and benefice until absolved by the apostolic see.70
What was this blessing? Gratian described the nuptial blessing as one that we have had cause to study before in this chapter: God’s blessing of Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28, the injunction “be fruitful and multiply.”71 As Philip Reynolds has argued, use of this blessing by a priest evoked the doctrine that no man should separate what God had joined.72 This distinction, if employed by dutiful priests, offered the lay public a clear demarcation between the two kinds of marriage, as well as a sort of invitation to recognize this difference and to shame their neighbors when they married in less holy circumstances than provided by first marriages.
We also have further evidence that the presence—or absence—of the nuptial blessing mattered. As James Brundage explains, parishioners often asked priests to give them the nuptial blessing regardless of their status. Priests had to decide how to handle couples entering into second marriages who sought the nuptial blessing despite the prohibition. Apparently, these priests often granted their parishioners’ requests and presumably were often well paid for their willingness to grant their parishioners’ wishes. This happened so often, in fact, that the commissions given papal legates and nuncios regularly included the power to dispense clerics from the irregularity they fell into by giving the nuptial blessing at second marriages.73 The work of Jean-Baptiste Molin and Protais Mutembe on marriage rituals in France offers further evidence of the importance of the nuptial blessing. In northern France, priests seeking to avoid incurring irregularity and to appease their parishioners conferred different blessings to replace the forbidden one and recited the new benediction at a different point in the ritual.74
Deprived or granted some form of the nuptial blessing, in northern France, widows and widowers who remarried also faced considerable legal difficulties. Certainly canon law in no way prohibited the remarriage of widows or widowers, despite the great importance attributed to the ideal of monogamous marriage. Nevertheless, beginning in the late twelfth century, papal letters placed heavy and indeed—if implemented fully—potentially insurmountable obstacles in the path of those men and women who wished to enter into remarriages. To be sure, according to Church doctrine, a widow could remarry without fear of ecclesiastical prosecution. But in defining who was a widow, canonists settled on a lawyerly requirement. According to the canon law of the late twelfth century and thereafter, a widow was a woman who could provide proof that her husband had died. Without such proof, however, those already married to a living spouse, a spouse not proven to be dead, could not enter into any other marriages. The bonds of matrimony could only be dissolved by proven death. To understand the impact of these rules on widows and widowers—illegitimate or legitimate—we must review the medieval canon law of marriage and remarriage in more detail.
The central texts on marriage from the “classical” period of canon law are found in two main collections of medieval canon law: several chapters from the compilation of canons known as Gratian’s Decretum (now believed to have been compiled in two recensions, probably by two different men, both known to posterity as Gratian) and book 4 of the five supplemental books known collectively as the Liber Extra, a collection of decretals prepared by Raymond of Peñafort (d. 1275) and published by Pope Gregory IX in 1234. As we will see, the handling of remarriage underwent a considerable shift.75
On the subject of absent and missing spouses, Gratian offered papal letters that allowed remarriage on the grounds of belief, of good faith. If the spouse left behind believed her husband had died and remarried on that basis, she was without fault as long as she left the second husband and returned to the first as soon as she learned he still lived. Gratian’s selected texts urged forgiveness for a wife who had remarried on the presumption that her absent and missing husband had died. As long as she left her second husband and returned to the first, she could not be prosecuted as an adulteress.76 This forgiving rule, however, left unresolved how long an abandoned wife ought to wait before remarriage and what might constitute an acceptable reason to assume that her spouse had died.
That gap provided ample space for subsequent interpretations of the laws.77 At the close of the twelfth century, amid preparations for the Third Crusade, Pope Lucius III (1181–85), writing ostensibly “to all Christians held in captivity by Saracens” but answering the requests of wives left behind, argued that “a wife should not remarry without knowing for certain of her spouse’s death, and indeed nor should a husband.”78 The letter of Lucius III originally allowed remarriage only if the abandoned spouse had “complete certainty” about the death of the missing spouse. However, Raymond excluded this certain knowledge, an improbably ambitious state of mind in these matters, from the text he included in the collection of decretals.79 The successor to Lucius III, Pope Clement III (1187–91), required something more than certainty of mind. Responding to the petitions of women who had waited more than seven years for their absent husbands’ return, Clement ordered these women to wait until they had “certain news” of death, however long it may take.80 Now, instead of belief, there is a requirement of “certain news.” Instead of “complete certainty” we have a requirement of external evidence. This, then, was how the marital designs of men and women with absent spouses ought to be handled henceforth. “Certain news” meant full proof, which was obtained, for example, with the sworn testimony of two witnesses to a death or documentary evidence.
Raymond of Peñafort provided further commentary on the subject of remarriage in his “Summa” on marriage. As Raymond explained, a wife could not remarry without proof of death, without having “good reason” to think her husband had died. “Regardless of her youth,” if her husband had gone to fight the Saracens or in another faraway place, she could not remarry unless she was certain he had died. This certainty required, for Raymond, the oath of the missing man’s commander or of his friends who knew that he had died.81 Raymond thus placed an imposing obstacle in the path of those married to absent spouses who wished to remarry.
Thirteenth-century secular law offers a mixed record in upholding these rules. In Spain, with evident disregard for the Church’s position on remarriage, the Siete Partidas allowed for the presumption of death after ten years of absence.82 In northern France, meanwhile, the Coutumes de Beauvaisis of Philippe de Beaumanoir (1250–96) offered strict allegiance to the canon law discussed above. As de Beaumanoir wrote, it used to be said that wives whose husbands had left the country could remarry after seven years. But “because of the dangers that resulted,” the Church ordered that no married woman
