Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne. Sara McDougall
to Christ and the church; making the first Adam a monogamist in the flesh and the second [that is; Christ] a monogamist in the spirit.40
Jerome was not alone in this view. The orthodox view shared among the Church Fathers, even as they expressed more or less extreme views on the subject, was clearly that Christian marriage ought to be this singular and indivisible bond. In insisting on this definition of marriage, they confronted a problem that was not precisely the same as that of late medieval bigamy: the problem of polygamy, which manifestly violated their definition of marriage. In particular, the polygamy of the Old Testament patriarchs seemed to pose a challenge to the Christian insistence on monogamy. Indeed, the patriarch Jacob had two wives and two concubines, and King Solomon had hundreds of each. As the Church Fathers claimed, however, the polygamy of the patriarchs was not to be understood as an example to follow but rather as a sign. Jacob’s marriages to Leah and Rachel, for example, prefigured Christ’s marriage to the Old and New Testaments. Weak-eyed Leah stood in for the blind Jews (who failed to recognize Christ’s divinity), while Jacob’s beloved Rachel was the spouse who signified the Church.41 These theological conclusions would also apply to the bigamous Christians of northern France who did not actually keep their multiple spouses with them but were married to more than one at a time.
In the Western Church, most clearly from the ninth century onward, an absolute ban on both bigamy and divorce with any right to remarry held firm throughout the Middle Ages.42 To give one example, in the thirteenth century Innocent III completely rejected the idea that the polygamy allowed to the patriarchs might also be permitted Christians:
We have read that the patriarchs and other just men before the law and after the law had many wives in common…. But this seems incompatible and contrary to Christian Faith, where from the beginning one rib was turned into one woman, and it was testified in divine Scripture that because of this a man shall leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife, and they shall be two in one flesh. It did not say, “three or more” but “two” nor did it say “shall cleave to wives,” but “to wife.” … And so that truth may prevail over falsehood, without any hesitation we state: that it was never in any way lawful for anyone to have several wives at once, unless it was conceded by divine revelation….”43
In short, Christians who married were told to follow not the example of the patriarchs but the example of Adam and Eve.
In this context, what did canonists and theologians say about the real possibility that Christians might nevertheless, in defiance of the law, marry themselves to more than one living spouse? Here an important terminological question presents itself. To marry while already married to a living spouse was an offense that, in the Christian Middle Ages, had no name. In the modern world we describe such a marriage as “bigamous” and the twice-married person as a bigamist. However, in the Middle Ages, bigamy was a term used to describe any manner of remarriage, both those marriages made following the death of a spouse and also marriages contracted while a first spouse lived. The great thirteenth-century canonist Hostiensis made some effort at resolving this ambiguity by distinguishing between “true” bigamy (two at once) and “interpretive” bigamy (remarriage after death or annulment),44 but on the whole those called “bigamists” were spouses who had married more than once in succession, especially clergy.
Indeed, medieval canon law and theological texts emphasized most clearly the considerable importance of bigamy in determining clerical status.45 Under the rubric of “bigamy,” medieval canonists and theologians most often discussed the status of clerics who had either married more than one wife in succession or who had married a widow. In marrying in these ways, clerics transformed themselves into bigamists. This meant that they could never become priests and never rise in the ecclesiastical hierarchy above the rank of subdeacon. They also could not seek the milder justice of ecclesiastical courts if threatened by secular authorities.46
As this shows, to become a bigamist was to make an irrevocable change in one’s status. While even a priest guilty of fornication or some other crime might be allowed to continue as a priest after penance, a man married to more than one wife in succession could not ever become a priest. Drawing on Genesis and Ephesians and upon centuries of tradition, Innocent IV gave his reasons for this rule, reasons that we have seen before. Why did the priesthood exclude bigamists?47
I reply it is because the words: “os, caro, carne, uxori” “bone, flesh, from flesh, to wife” are in the singular. And also because of the final word of the phrase “they are two in one flesh” … marriage between two only is the sign of the one Church of which Christ is the one Husband.
But what about concurrent remarriages? As for those Christians already married to a living spouse who concurrently remarried, as another great thirteenth-century canonist, Raymond of Peñafort, insisted, it was improper to call those who had two wives at the same time “bigamists,” because it was not possible to be legitimately married to two women at once.48 If canonists debated over what to call the offender, the offense of marrying while already married at least had a name, if a rather imprecise one in that it could easily seem to describe successive remarriage as well as concurrent: “binae nuptiae” or “bina matrimonia.”49
The main topic of this book is not the bigamy that prevented clerics from advancing in holy orders but the crime of bigamy. Having just admitted that many weighty authorities said that one should not call a person who was married to more than one spouse at once a bigamist, such a statement may seem anachronistic or just wrong. In light of this traditional use of the term bigamy to describe clerical status rather than a criminal remarriage, the use of the word “bigamy” may seem inappropriate to describe a medieval act of concurrent remarriage. Indeed, David d’Avray included the text of Innocent IV quoted above in his discussion of bigamy in his book Medieval Marriage50 and drew from it and other passages the plausible conclusion that for the Church, concern over bigamy was concern over clerics who could not become priests, not Christians who married while already married to a living spouse. For d’Avray, the marriage symbolism found in this passage is related only to the prior marital status of a cleric who wished to become a priest or to the remarriage of a widow or widower following the death of a spouse.
D’Avray is clearly right insofar as prosecution records against men and women who married concurrently almost never use the word bigamy. Nevertheless, while there are risks any time a scholar chooses to use arguably anachronistic terminology, I think there are good reasons to use the term as I use it in this book. My reasons have to do precisely with d’Avray’s analysis of the importance of a monogamous bond as a symbol. In fact, unless we permit ourselves the modern use of the term “bigamy,” we will not grasp the full significance of the marriage symbolism that d’Avray has so powerfully described. The theological concern over bigamy so central to marriage symbolism extended well beyond the status of clergy; to concurrent marriages, to criminal bigamy.
We must not allow fidelity to medieval terminology to prevent us from recognizing the medieval links between all sorts of remarriage and the real theological significance of concurrent remarriage. We must not exclude these ideas from our understanding of the criminal bigamy a layperson might commit. Even as they did not use the same words, medieval popes, canonists, and theologians clearly saw the two as connected. The quotation I reproduced earlier from Innocent III, as well as that of Innocent IV, makes this connection clear. In medieval canon law, the symbol or sacrament that barred a bigamist from becoming a priest similarly barred any person married to a still-living spouse from remarriage, and for the same reason: all Christian marriages—between two Christians and between a priest and his parish—had to be monogamous and indissoluble, like those of Adam and Eve and of Christ and the Church. Those who acted as if it were possible to lawfully marry while already married to another violated the same symbolic requirement as twice-married men who subsequently sought to become priests.
Accordingly, for two hopefully persuasive reasons, I will use the term bigamy. First, as I am writing for a modern audience and not for medieval canonists, I want to use the term because the behavior I wish to describe most closely resembles the crime of bigamy as we understand it today. Second, linking the legal and illegal forms of remarriage in using the term makes an important point: while these two methods