Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne. By Sara McDougall. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 209 pp. $55.00 cloth
In: Church History, Jg. 84 (2015-03-01), S. 238-240
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(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne . By Sara McDougall . The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2012. 209 pp. $55.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesA medieval jurist would not have a clue what the first four words in the title of McDougall's book means. As she explains in the beginning of her book, bigamy was a technical legal term that applied only--with rare exceptions--to a cleric who married twice serially. His two marriages made him bigamous and incurred an impediment to advancement in orders during the medieval and early modern periods. Laypersons who were married to two living persons were not called bigamists but adulterers. The jurists named a layperson's impediment to marry another person while being married, an "impedimentum ligationis" (impediment of bond). The person's crime was adultery, not bigamy. "Bigamy" changed its meaning sometime during the last two centuries in all the modern European languages.McDougall argues that that bigamy in the modern sense was a significant problem in Northern France at the end of the Middle Ages. She uses the modern term so as not to confuse her readers. The main thesis of her book is that bigamy was as serious an issue in Christian society as marrying within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity or as marrying clandestinely. She focuses her study on Northern France, especially the area around Troyes and uses the court records of episcopal tribunals. Her first chapter is a general introduction to the problem. Her second chapter is devoted to bigamous males, chapter 3 to bigamous females, chapter 4 to why people became bigamous, chapter 5 to why the courts prosecuted the crime.In her first chapter, she illustrates how rules about marriage differed in different parts of Christendom. Although one cannot know with certainty, the crusades and other distant wars created situations that enabled men to disappear for long periods of time. This provided women with opportunities to marry again. Natalie Davis gave us a wonderful sixteenth-century story of Martin Guerre who returned home from war to find another man in his marital bed and who had even taken his name. Brenda Bolton and Constance Rousseau gave us another story that took place three centuries earlier about Palmerius of Picciati who returned from a series of strange adventures to find his wife in the arms of another legitimate husband. The jurists, popes, and the courts had a hard time deciding these cases. Roman law established that after a ten-year absence, a man could be declared dead. The popes waivered. Pope Alexander III concurred with Roman law. A few years later Pope Celestine III ruled seven years was a long enough wait. Some jurists thought a spouse could wait forever. Secular law sometimes followed Roman law and sometimes canon law and sometimes, as McDougall documents, customary law had more lenient or even stiffer requirements. Uniformity was not to be found in the Middle Ages and not in the United States today; a spouse must wait between five and seven years to declare the wandering spouse dead. …
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Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne. By Sara McDougall. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 209 pp. $55.00 cloth
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Autor/in / Beteiligte Person: | Pennington, Ken |
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Zeitschrift: | Church History, Jg. 84 (2015-03-01), S. 238-240 |
Veröffentlichung: | Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2015 |
Medientyp: | unknown |
ISSN: | 1755-2613 (print) ; 0009-6407 (print) |
DOI: | 10.1017/s0009640714001887 |
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