In 1522, Marie Quatrelivres, accused of adultery by her husband and found guilty, was condemned to be beaten with sticks on three Fridays and afterwards enclosed in a convent. The court allotted her husband 2 years to decide if he wanted to take her back. If he did not choose to reconcile with her, she was to be enclosed for life and lose all of her property.Footnote 1 So wrote eminent jurist Jean Papon (1505–1590) in his collection of notable cases heard before the royal courts of France.Footnote 2 Papon described a handful of other sixteenth century adultery cases similarly decided, and then cited a contemporary and fellow eminent jurist, Nicolas Bohier, as having stated that another common punishment for adultery in France was to cut off an adulterous woman's hair, tear her clothes, and parade her in shame throughout the town or city in which she lived.Footnote 3
The modern reader might assume that the punishments just described were typical expressions of an unchanging premodern hostility toward female adultery. Papon and his contemporaries described behaviors not found in medieval France. Northern French courts did not inflict these punishments before the sixteenth century. Moreover, they did not treat adultery as a female crime. The history of adultery prosecution in premodern France is not, as one might suppose, a tale of unchanging harsh punishment of women, dating back to antiquity and vanishing only with the Enlightenment. It is, instead, a tale of dramatic changes in the handling of adultery, changes driven, I will suggest, by two different reform movements, the first in the Later Middle Ages and the second taking shape in the final decades of the fifteenth century before exploding in the sixteenth century. We are a long way from understanding these reform movements in any detail. We are also a long way from understanding how they fit into the context of the shifting ideologies of the various reform movements that mark the transition into what is called the Early Modern period, the most famous of which is Luther's Protestant Reformation. Before we can address why all this took place and what impact it had in society, we must begin by understanding how it took place. This article will take up that task.
Tracking this transformation requires careful analysis of the records of legal practice. Both of the punishments described by the sixteenth century jurists also appear in medieval law books, which might seem to suggest their use in medieval court practice, just as in the sixteenth century. The scattered surviving archival court records of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, tell a different story. As this article will explain, in the fifteenth century, and probably even earlier, church courts in Northern France generally claimed jurisdiction over adultery, and punished offenders, both male and female, with fines.Footnote 4 In so doing, the courts of fifteenth century Northern France had acted to enforce the Christian precept that husbands, like wives, should not commit adultery. In fact, they did much more: these courts prosecuted and punished adulterous men far more often than women.Footnote 5 Moreover, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, not only did these courts prosecute and punish men more often than women, they punished husbands more often than wives, regularly punishing married men for adultery with unmarried women.Footnote 6 This pattern defies current scholarly expectations for the gendered punishment of adultery.Footnote 7 We expect that medieval adultery prosecutions typically targeted wives, and did so regardless of the fact that canon law insisted that husbands and wives should be treated the same in questions of adultery. This tendency to punish wives does appear to be how many medieval Italian and English courts handled adultery.Footnote 8 What we see instead in Northern French fifteenth century legal practice is the implementation of a reform movement that considered adulterous husbands worse offenders than adulterous wives. That state of affairs changed with a new wave of reform that ushered in the sixteenth century. Royal jurists objected to the local courts' intermittently intrusive and aggressive prosecution of adulterous husbands, considering instead only adulterous wives and their lovers as deserving of criminal punishment for adultery. They also objected to the generally mild financial penalties that local courts typically punished adultery with, sometimes complaining as well that adultery was all too often left unpunished altogether. The new order they instituted refocused attention on wives and their lovers, menacing both with harsh punishment not seen in prior centuries.
This article is intended to shed as much light as much as possible on these obscure and complex changes in law and legal practice. This shift from an emphasis on punishing men to an emphasis on punishing women is not only an important chapter in gender history. It also has implications for the history of Christianity and the history of conflicts between church and state. Although there is not space in this article to fully elucidate all aspects of this remarkable transformation, particularly its causes and consequences in sixteenth century legal practice, I will suggest that these dramatic changes are best understood as the results of two different efforts to reform Christian communities and families, efforts that reflected two different concepts of gender roles in marriage. The first movement targeted men, but punished adultery more leniently than the second movement would. Beginning in the late fourteenth century, influential theologians and preachers such as the eminent chancellor of the University of Paris Jean Gerson (1363–1429), who set high standards for the moral conduct of men, particularly married men.Footnote 9 Gerson and his followers charged men with responsibility for their own moral—including sexual—conduct as well as that of their wives and children. Being cast as the responsible authority figures in marriage, modeled on (the male) Christ as head of (the female) church, had legal consequences for husbands. Judicial officers in local courts throughout Northern France and Burgundian lands applied these teachings in their legal practice, regularly prosecuting and punishing men for sexual infractions far more often than their female partners.Footnote 10 This prosecution is best understood not only in the context of the reform efforts just outlined, but also as an outgrowth of church courts' ongoing effort to regulate the illicit sex of its clergy, the monks and priests who kept mistresses regardless of their vows of celibacy.Footnote 11 Acting on the ideas of Gerson and his followers—part of the standard university training for many of these court officials—judges and officers of local courts took it upon themselves to hold husbands to standards similar to those applied to clergy, prosecuting them for engaging in sex outside of marriage.Footnote 12 As for the adulterous wives for whom canon law recommended enclosure in monasteries, these courts by and large left them alone, leaving them to be punished, or not, by their husbands and families.Footnote 13 All this was intended to promote the sanctity and indissolubility of marriage, indissoluble regardless of adultery. Husbands caught at adultery were to pay their fines and reconcile with their wives. Wives caught at adultery could be privately chastised, perhaps, but should be forgiven.
By the sixteenth century, in the context of a vast effort to assert the power of French royal justice over the church, reforming jurists of another kind had developed a different understanding of the role of courts in prosecuting adultery as well the gravity of the offense, including who should be punished for adultery and how. First, they strove to increase royal, secular control over adultery prosecution. In so doing, these reformers took their cue not from Gerson's moral teachings but from his political theory as taught by the canon law faculty of the University of Paris. Members of the Paris Parlement deployed these theories in their attack on papal power in France, and in their various efforts to insist on the supremacy of royal justice in France.Footnote 14 These jurists are widely known to have eagerly asserted both royal and patriarchal authority in the kingdom of France and in French households, and to incorporate Roman law principles in their legal system.Footnote 15 Scholarship on the subject has focused on their efforts to require parental consent for marriage and on the 1556 Edict of Blois, which allowed parents to disinherit children who married without their consent.Footnote 16 For quite similar reasons, I argue, jurists of the royal court also redefined adultery and its prosecution. Instead of treating adulterous laymen like clergy, subject to monetary punishment in church courts for their sexual infractions, sixteenth century jurists advocated punishing adulterous women as disobedient nuns were treated, threatening them with the confiscation of their property and enclosing them in convents. Seemingly inspired by what one scholar called “the rigorist vogue provoked by the Reformation,” royal jurists menaced adulteresses and their lovers with harsh punishments not seen in practice in prior centuries, restoring the punishments instituted by the Emperors Justinian and Constantine.Footnote 17 At the same time, again in accordance with Justinian, these royal jurists did not seek to continue to arrest and criminally prosecute suspected adulterers based on rumor or private denunciation, as local courts had done in the fifteenth century. Instead, they exempted adulterous husbands from prosecution, privileged husbands and fathers among the newly constrained number of those who could accuse a wife or her lover of adultery, and deprived all courts of the power to prosecute adultery based on suspicion or private denunciation.Footnote 18 This willingness to place limits on their own prosecutorial powers reflected more than just a different understanding of a husband's authority than that found in previous centuries in Northern France. As I will argue, it also reflected a different understanding of the very purpose of marriage, and the appropriate roles of men and women in marriage.
In what follows, I will discuss in detail what we can discern about the laws and prosecution of adultery in late medieval France, and suggest why the law changed by the sixteenth century. First, I will review the laws on adultery and offer evidence for the absence of monastic enclosure as punishment for adultery in the legal practice of Northern France before the sixteenth century. Second, I will describe the treatment of adultery that we do find in medieval court records. I will also explore what we know about how these cases came to the attention of the court, how the court summoned and treated the alleged offenders, and how people responded to this legal practice. I will then address the legal changes enacted by royal jurists near the turn of the sixteenth century and offer explanations as to why the laws governing adultery in France changed so radically. I will conclude by offering a preliminary investigation into the implementation of these new rules by examining the case of Marie Quatrelivres in more detail.
To access the laws and practices of adultery prosecution before and just after 1500, this article draws upon various kinds of sources. In addition to law and legal commentary, it is based on archival research conducted in local court records, usually registers of cases or fines, records primarily from Northeastern France. Both church and secular courts of Northern France claimed jurisdiction over the criminal prosecution of adultery.Footnote 19 As both courts acted upon those claims throughout the fifteenth century, this study takes stock of both kinds of court records. In particular, this article relies upon analysis of the church court records of Troyes, in Northeastern France, and makes use of court records from neighboring regions as well.Footnote 20 This article also relies upon research in the voluminous records of the Paris Parlement, the royal courts whose jurisdiction included appellate cases as well as cases that the Crown claimed exclusive competence over. The Parlement's records offer an opportunity to glimpse some spectacular and scandalous adultery cases brought directly to the Parlement, but also the alleged behavior of these local courts when adultery cases arrived before the Parlement on appeal. These appellate cases provide descriptions of how local courts operated, and also allow analysis of how people interacted with these courts, and their feelings about the courts' prosecution of adultery. In addition to these records of law and legal practice, this article also draws upon chronicles and charters, which provide cultural and social context, in addition to accounts of celebrated and scandalous acts of adultery.
I. The Fifteenth Century
Medieval canon law—the law of the Catholic Church—unequivocally condemned extramarital sex as a violation of both divine and human law. This condemnation pertained to the extramarital sex of husbands and wives alike, treating all sex outside of marriage as a grave sin regardless of the gender of the spouse.Footnote 21 One of the most important canonists of the Middle Ages, the twelfth century jurist called Gratian, faithfully recorded this principle in his widely influential compilation and reconciliation of canon law.Footnote 22 As Gratian wrote, quoting the venerable fourth century authority Saint Ambrose: “What is not permitted to wives is not permitted to husbands. Chastity [in this context meaning no sex outside of marriage] is expected of husbands as well as wives.”Footnote 23 Medieval canonists differed on how strictly this equivalence ought to be maintained, but they all agreed, at least in principle, that husbands, too, should not commit adultery.Footnote 24 In their discussions, canonists drew upon a wide range of ancient and august authorities to emphasize the gravity of the offense and to describe various consequences for adultery. They offered several examples of the punishments or penances assigned in earlier periods, ranging from the Old Testament stoning of adulteresses and their lovers to the texts of the early church fathers and the guides for confession and penance that called instead for several years of penance, usually 7.Footnote 25
That said, despite the repeated claim that husbands and wives both had to refrain from adultery, medieval canonists exhibited far more interest in the punishment of women. Commentators offering their own interpretations of the canon law alongside some discussion of legal practice generally occupied themselves only with female adultery and its consequences.Footnote 26 Typically, they gave no examples of criminal punishment for adulterous husbands. Instead, they discussed only a few limited means of restraining adulterous men beyond automatic excommunication and penance, which they left to priests to determine and assign in confession. These canonists did allow that a wife could sue for the right to live apart from an adulterous husband, but in so doing, a wife had to meet higher standards of proof when accusing her husband than the reverse.Footnote 27 More equitably, an adulterous husband could not prosecute his wife for adultery any more than an adulterous wife could so prosecute her adulterous husband.Footnote 28
Meanwhile, canonists treated the criminal punishment of adulterous wives in detail. As Edward Reno has recently argued, beginning in the early thirteenth century, an ever-growing number of canonists called for the harsh punishment of adulteresses and discussed in detail how these punishments should be implemented.Footnote 29 For example, Johannes Teutonicus (d.1252), one of the most influential commentators on canon law of the Middle Ages, twice explained the consequences for female adultery in his commentary on the central texts of medieval canon law known as the glossa ordinaria. These descriptions closely resemble the two examples given by Jean Papon discussed at the beginning of this article. The first appeared as part of the commentary offered by Teutonicus in his analysis of the question of if a husband could or should take an adulterous wife back after she had performed penance. After determining that a husband could take back his penitent wife, Teutonicus wrote that a common punishment for adulterous women in the thirteenth century involved whipping, shaving their heads, tearing their clothes, and parading them publicly.Footnote 30 Elsewhere in the text, in his commentary on the question of how a woman who had sex with her servant ought to be punished, he explained that in the past execution had been considered appropriate.Footnote 31 He added, however, that the laws of his own time condemned a convicted adulteress to a beating and enclosure in a monastery, the punishment that had been mandated by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the sixth century.Footnote 32 A woman convicted of adultery was to be confined in a monastery. Her husband could take her back if and when he chose until 2 years had passed. At that point, if he did not want her, she was shorn and veiled and was to remain enclosed until she died. Her property passed to her family or to her husband, and some of that property, usually one third, was to be given to the monastery for her support.Footnote 33
According to Julia Hillner, Justinian viewed confinement in a monastery as the appropriate punishment for high-ranking men and women, clergy and laity, who were found guilty of offences such as adultery, unjustified divorce, or defloration.Footnote 34 As Hillner argued, monastic confinement for elites appealed to Justinian not only as an appropriate means to punish a particular kind of elite criminal such as the higher-class female adulteress, but also a means to bring about their reform and reintegration in society.Footnote 35 We might imagine, although Teutonicus gives us little indication, that in the thirteenth century, status may have played a similar role in any enclosure of adulterous wives. Such a punishment may well have been considered appropriate for high-status women, as with the example Teutonicus gave of a woman who slept with her servant. We might therefore interpret the public punishment of whipping and shearing that Teutonicus described as punishment more appropriate for an adulterous woman of a lower class. Or, we might imagine that a court's decision to either publicly punish or to enclose an adulterous woman was determined by geographic rather than class boundaries, as the descriptions offered in the sixteenth century by Jean Papon and Nicolas Bohier seem to indicate.Footnote 36 It is the Justinianic enclosure as opposed to public whipping that received the bulk of the attention that medieval canonists paid to the subject, and their discussion of this enclosure does not shed much light on questions of status or geographic differences. Their discussion does, however, focus heavily on the practical considerations for application of this punishment.
As Reno has demonstrated, medieval canonists wrote at great length on the subject of the monastic confinement of an adulterous wife. Such frequent discussion, and particularly the highly practical topics that these jurists discussed while treating the subject, might seem to suggest that medieval courts made use of enclosure to punish female adultery. This emphasis on the punishment of wives might also seem to suggest that, as many scholars have assumed, adultery prosecutions in the Middle Ages normally led to the punishment of women, to the exclusion of both husbands and male lovers.Footnote 37
Nevertheless, archival sources offer next to nothing by way of proof than any woman of medieval Northern France was so punished, whether by church courts or by secular courts.Footnote 38 Nor is there much that convincingly demonstrates that women were frequently subject to the other punishment described by Jean Papon and by Johannes Teutonicus, that of having their hair shorn. Whippings of adulterous men and women certainly did take place, but it is not clear how often. Most importantly of all, however any punishment took place, there is no evidence that demonstrates that female sexual offenders were subject to punishment more often than male offenders in Northern France in the fifteenth century, or to worse punishment than male offenders; in fact, quite the contrary.
What scattered references we have to what resembles monastic enclosure as punishment for adultery are only that: resemblances. As we have so much canon law commentary on enclosure from the twelfth and especially the thirteenth centuries, we might expect to find at least some hints of enclosure taking place at that time at the very least, but these expectations are not met.Footnote 39 Throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we still find no evidence of a court-ordered enclosure as punishment for adultery in Northern France. For example, although modern scholars have often assumed that one of the adulterous daughters-in-law of King Philip IV was punished with enclosure, we have no evidence for such an enclosure, and a good deal of evidence that strongly suggests that no such thing ever happened.Footnote 40 Even in the fifteenth century, with far more surviving sources to search through than in prior centuries, we still find little by way of evidence of enclosure.
One husband of the early fifteenth century Parisian bourgeoisie, Andre du Moulin, certainly did obtain court-ordered enclosure of his wife, Jeanne la Marcelle, on two occasions, if not in a convent. There is no explicit mention of adultery in the court proceedings, only that Jeanne had not conducted herself as a good wife should, but adultery is certainly a possibility. When Parlement gave the order for her second confinement they also sent to prison a cleric who worked for the couple. Whatever Jeanne had done, her confinement in both cases seems to have been a sort of house arrest. The first time the location is unspecified, but her husband and cousin were to have the only keys. The second time is it a knight and his wife who were given custody. Subsequent litigation involving Jeanne, now a widow and freed from her confinement, reveals the temporary nature of this enclosure.Footnote 41
Aside from this exception, in the fifteenth century, the only women found guilty and punished by enclosure, and particularly monastic enclosure, were those women who had also been found guilty of the murder, or attempted murder, of their husbands. Adultery alone, even accompanied by theft, does not seem to have merited enclosure in fifteenth-century royal courts. In one rather infamous adultery case, in 1466, we find a story celebrated by chroniclers for the scandal it caused, as it involved representatives from two of the wealthiest and most powerful families of Paris. In this case the Paris Parlement declared Isabeau de Cambrai guilty of adultery and theft, and strongly suspected her of having attempted to poison her husband by means of potions and witchcraft. As punishment for these crimes, Isabeau lost her dowry and marital property to her husband, Guillaume Colombel, who had survived the alleged attempts at poisoning.Footnote 42 Although the possibility of enclosing Isabeau was not raised during her trial, Parlement did consider meting out such punishment to other adulterous wives who had conspired in their husbands' deaths. In one case, the natal family of the victim asked for the enclosure of the murderess Blanche d'Overbreuc, but the king ordered her pardoned and freed.Footnote 43 In a second case, in 1486, Renée of Vendômois had, with the help of her lover, killed her husband. Instead of having her burned alive, the king sentenced her to spend the rest of her days in monastic penance, enclosed in the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris.Footnote 44 If anyone before the sixteenth century ever asked a French court to enclose in a convent an adulteress who had not compounded her crime by murdering her husband, I have found no trace of it.Footnote 45
Turning once more to chronicles, we come to the closest thing I have found to an example of monastic enclosure following adultery, if with no hint of whipping or a judicial sentence. As contemporary chroniclers related, Etiennette de Besançon, of a wealthy and esteemed bourgeois family of Paris, was the wife of Henri de Paris, a notable merchant. In December of 1468, Etiennette ran off with the noble (and equally married) Gaston IV, Count of Foix, who seems to have been something of a womanizer.Footnote 46 Etiennette spent 5 or 6 days with Count Gaston in Blois and Tours, before going into the care of her aunt, a prioress of the Abbey of Fontevraud, where she stayed for some time, perhaps years, before returning to Paris. Afterwards, we do not know how much longer, her husband Henri died. Etiennette then remarried, and well, to a high-ranking royal official, a secretary to the king and a royal notary. She was still living in 1501 when we find the last trace of her rather remarkable life.Footnote 47 If her time at the abbey was, in fact, an enclosure as punishment for adultery, it lacked any legal trappings. It involved, it seems, no court. Instead, the family handled matters as quietly as it could while the literati of Paris alternatively deplored and enjoyed the scandal.Footnote 48 The temporary enclosure may well have been Etiennette's choice, as welcome penance for her lapse, or as repose from a world that had briefly overwhelmed her. It calls to mind the punishment so often discussed by the medieval canonists, but only that. It also, arguably, played only a small part in her life, as she not only returned to her first husband but also married extremely well after his death.
What, however, of the other punishment discussed by Jean Papon, and Johannes Teutonicus before him? If adulterous women were not enclosed, were they shorn and publicly humiliated? Certainly public humiliation and whipping seems to have been part of Southern French legal practice in the fourteenth century. Leah Otis-Cour and Jean-Marie Carbasse have found adultery cases from secular courts of Southern France that punished both male and female offenders with whipping, forcing them to run naked—or at least scantily clad—through the town.Footnote 49 As for shearing, the only indication we have that an adulterous woman might have been so treated is one image found in an illuminated edition of the customs of Toulouse.Footnote 50 The image suggests the possibility of removing a woman's hair as part of legal practice, but by no means provides evidence of it. No court record from Northern or Southern France that I have seen ordered that a woman's hair be cut as part of her punishment for adultery, nor have I come across any mention of it in any story collection, play, sermon, or song from the period.Footnote 51
The greatest quantities of evidence suggest something quite different. Across France, local secular and church courts alike ordered hundreds of alleged adulterers to pay fines as punishment.Footnote 52 Although whipping was clearly at least a threatened component of fourteenth-century legal practice, courts quite often offered paying a fine as an alternative, an option at least for those who could afford to pay.Footnote 53 In addition to the assessment of fines and, extremely rarely, whippings, there are a few examples of other types of judicial punishments from the fifteenth century, practiced, if only occasionally, by both church and secular courts. For example, in 1460, the officers of a municipal court in Amiens banished a woman they had found guilty of living in concubinage with a married man. Her accomplice, who had left his wife for his mistress, they sentenced to an amende honorable,Footnote 54 ordering him to offer a candle worth a pound of wax at three religious institutions.Footnote 55 In a similar case from 1476, they sentenced a married man to an amende honorable and imprisonment, while banishing the prostitute he was accused of adultery with.Footnote 56 That said, the work of Isabelle Paresys indicates that fines were the favored means of punishment for adultery in Amiens.Footnote 57 As for other courts using similar punishments, in the late fourteenth century, the magistrate (echevin) and bailiff of Seclin, near Lille, banished a married woman for 3 years for theft and adultery. She appealed her case to the Paris Parlement and won.Footnote 58 Equally rarely, church courts also inflicted alternative punishments, or at least claimed that they had the power to do so, as in the case of the prior of Orleans.Footnote 59 In Cambrai, the bishop's court sentenced to exposure on the ladder of the scaffold at least one adulteress, a woman found guilty of notorious adultery with several men.Footnote 60
Clearly, however, these courts almost always punished adultery with fines. The courts seem to have determined the sum they demanded based on a complicated assessment of the gravity of the offence, an assessment heavily qualified by the presumed ability of the offender to pay. Fines ranged from pennies to considerable sums of money. Most often what courts required of adulterers was a few pennies, or sometimes pounds of wax.Footnote 61 The church court records from the diocese of Troyes, in the Champagne region, and records of fines collected by secular lords of neighboring Burgundy, both offer examples of this. In the fifteenth century bishop's court in Troyes, the fines in question were most often 20 or 40 sous, but could run as high as 200 sous or as low as a pound of wax (9 sous).Footnote 62 Fines levied by the lords of Burgundy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries ranged far more greatly in size and in currency from pennies to florins, with sums reaching 1,100 sous, but far more often in the range of 20–100 sous, with an emphasis on the smaller amounts.Footnote 63 Sometimes, both parties to the adultery were fined, either together or separately, but that was relatively rare. Instead, most often only one person appeared before the court and paid a fine. Our evidence for these prosecutions usually looks something more or less like this example taken from the bishop of Troyes' registers: “Thomas Brioys of Nogent-sur-Aube, punished because he is married and was keeping with him Marguerite, the widow of Jean Lasue, is fined 40 sous.”Footnote 64
This example offers a valuable hint about the role of both gender and marital status in these cases. As this example suggests, adulterous wives were far from being the exclusive targets of the prosecution. In fact, as I have argued elsewhere, in the fifteenth century, it was primarily men that Northern French church courts and secular courts punished for adultery, far more often than women.Footnote 65 Mariann Naessens has shown much the same for Flanders.Footnote 66 In Northern France, the Low Countries, and London, whenever scholars have sought out statistical information on gender difference in punishment for adultery, men predominate, often more than twice or three times as often as female adulteresses.Footnote 67 In these places, even in the rare instances when these courts punished adultery in other ways than assessing fines, such as banishment (usually temporary) or penance, women do not outnumber men.Footnote 68 Moreover, my analysis of court records from Northern France allows for further nuance. There is also a striking, or even shocking, difference to be found by assessing the marital status of those accused of adultery. These courts prosecuted men not just as lovers of wives—as men who have sex with other men's wives—but as husbands who have sex with women other than their wives. Consider, for example, the case against Thomas Brioys, described previously. A husband was fined for a sexual offence; his crime was to commit adultery with a widow. As this illustrates, by examining not only the gender of the accused but also the marital status of both parties, we gain a deeper understanding as to the specific kinds of adultery that the court most often prosecuted and punished.
For every case in which we can determine the marital status of at least one of the alleged offenders, we find far more husbands than wives. In the majority of these cases, courts ordered husbands to pay fines for having had sex with unmarried women. Moreover, wives played a marginal role, both as accused and as the alleged partner of the accused. Instead of finding men punished as wives' lovers, we most often find married men fined for having sex with widows, with servants, and even with prostitutes.Footnote 69 In sum, punishment ran completely contrary to current scholarly expectations.Footnote 70 Instead of finding that these courts primarily punished men as lovers of wives, which the current scholarship would have led us to suspect, we find instead married men being punished for cheating on their wives. As for wives, we find them punished far less often.
Records of fines levied for adultery, while terse, thus offer an important lesson on the role of gender and marital status in fifteenth century punishment for adultery. At the same time, however, there is a great deal of information that these sources shed far less light on. We almost never know, for example, know how the cases came to court, nor the specifics of the accusations. Nor do we know what proof, if any, was offered. We do not know if witness testimony was used. It is rare also, that we learn if the alleged adulterers admitted or denied the charges. To gain at least some insight into these matters, we can draw only on scattered sources, most often found elsewhere than the local courts' own registers.
It is most frustrating that we rarely know how any of these cases came to the attention of a court or why a court chose to prosecute. This limits not only our understanding of legal procedure, but also of the social context in which these prosecutions took place. If vendetta, for example, lay behind many of the accusations, than the motivations of community members for these prosecutions would have been less of a concern over morality and much more an exploitation of a court to achieve private vengeance.Footnote 71 In such circumstances, although we can still see these courts as deciding to treat adultery as something they should punish people with fines for, we cannot attribute similar motivations to those who made adultery accusations. If, on the other hand, it is outraged husbands or families who denounced an individual or couple, the social context for the accusation could have had more to do with the adultery itself. We know that at least some angry or jealous husbands or wives reported the offense to the local secular or ecclesiastical court. We can suspect that some self-righteous or opportunistic neighbors acted as informers, but on the whole, we are left in the dark as to if or why someone might have decided to report a case of adultery to a court. Many of the cases are simply described as notorious, or that “fama” of adultery came to the attention of the court officers, and the court duly summoned the suspected offenders. We know about as much, which is to say as little, about how suspects came before the court. Sometimes they arrived in court in response to a summons read out in church or by the town crier. Other times, however, they came much more unwillingly.
In some cases, court officials caught suspects in the act. For example, in 1457, one married man of the diocese of Troyes and his mistress, a young woman who worked as a sort of farm hand for him, were found together and arrested at least twice in the course of their relationship. Once, officers of a local lord caught the woman in the man's house after dark. On a second occasion, royal officers burst in on the couple in a room that they had rented at a tavern, arrested them, and ultimately sent them to the bishop's court for punishment.Footnote 72 Records of the Paris Parlement offer accounts of both church and secular court officials engaging in these sorts of arrests, which often resemble modern-day drug raids.
Descriptions of these such arrests are found among the thousands of cases appealed to the Paris Parlement in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. These appeals offer an unexpected window on the potential intrusiveness and violence of local judicial proceedings against alleged adulterers. In 1310, to offer one early example, a burger of Figeac (a town near Cahors in Southern France) complained to the Parlement of Paris about the bailiff of the abbot of Figeac and his accomplices. The burger claimed that these men had entered his home in the middle of the night, dragged him, naked, from his bed, thrown him to the ground, beaten him, and locked him up in the abbot's prison. The bailiff explained, however, that he and his men had done so justly and licitly, as the burger had been found naked in that bed with a married woman. The Parlement agreed with the bailiff.Footnote 73
Similarly, in 1389, the Parlement upheld the prosecution and punishment of a married man and a widow, caught together by men of the bailiff of Maçon (a town in Burgundy). The bailiff's men had broken into the woman's house and seized the couple, dragged them out into the street, and beat them before imprisoning them and fining them. The couple claimed innocence of adultery, and that they had been having dinner with the husband's wife when the bailiff's men broke into the widow's home. The bailiff alleged in turn that the affair between the husband and widow was public knowledge in their village, and that they had persisted in adultery for more than 2 years despite repeated warnings before their arrest. As with the previous case, the Parlement chose to believe the bailiff.Footnote 74
Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing how often these arrests took place, as we cannot assume that all cases of this kind were appealed. As a result, we have no way of knowing how many of the alleged adulterers fined by these local courts received similar treatment. We can say, at least, that the aggressive behavior of these courts was the subject of considerable complaint, and that the judicial officials involved in these prosecutions were occasionally subjected to violent reprisals. To offer a few examples from church courts, in 1446, Gilet Simon, a married man, assaulted a judicial officer of the bishop's court in Troyes. After hearing from a neighbor that his mistress refused to see him because she was so upset by the repeated summons and threats of punishment from the bishop's court concerning their adultery, Gilet, infuriated, confronted the officer in the street and attacked him with a dagger.Footnote 75 In a second example of a dramatic attack on a judicial official, in 1381 Guillaume de Avernis, another husband, brought armed men into the courtroom with him and attacked a judge of the church court in Paris. His representatives subsequently claimed that Guillaume was not only not party to the attack on the judge, but that he was wholly innocent of adultery, and that church court officials habitually made false accusations against innocent men such as Guillaume.Footnote 76 Parlement upheld the conviction of Guillaume, just as it rejected the appeals of those prosecuted for adultery in all but one of the cases described.Footnote 77 Over time, however, the attitude of the royal court concerning local courts' jurisdiction over adultery and when and how it should be prosecuted would change.
II. Toward a New Order
As we trace reactions to the prosecutions of adulterous men, we see the beginnings of the transformation in the handling of adultery that would culminate near 1500. Fourteenth and fifteenth century court records offer evidence of repeated complaints about the alleged excesses of local courts in their policing of adultery. One reason we know of these complaints is that royal officials, seen in the examples just described as supporting the local courts in their efforts to police adultery, began to take increasing advantage of any popular discontent with local courts that they encountered. City councils and alleged adulterers alike complained of local courts acting without evidence or even sufficient rumor of adultery.Footnote 78 They complained that the accused, even if innocent, paid the fines demanded as punishment because such payments proved the only means of placating these overzealous courts. Kings and their courts listened with increasing interest, sanctioning local church courts on a number of occasions and urging them to limit their monitoring of the sexual behavior of the laity.
As early as 1329–30, at the Assembly of Paris-Vincennes, King Philip VI's judicial official claimed that church courts were prosecuting laypeople for adultery based on false accusations. In particular, he claimed that the bishop of Autun's court summoned well-behaving married men and women and falsely accused them of adultery, and then extorted money from them to resolve the cases. The bishop of Autun denied the charges and promised to correct any instances of wrongdoing.Footnote 79 In 1336, Philip VI forbade the bishop of Amiens the criminal prosecution of adultery, a prohibition that was repeated and reconfirmed in 1388 and 1406. Throughout these proceedings, the Paris Parlement and successive French kings upheld the rights of the municipality and royal officials of Amiens to the detriment of the bishops of Amiens, who protested at this perceived infringement on ecclesiastical privileges, but ultimately gave way.Footnote 80 To offer another example of these jurisdictional conflicts, since at least 1434, the bishop of Troyes' official and the king's bailiff in Troyes took turns arresting or excommunicating various members of the opposing party's staff. The Paris Parlement became involved, and interested itself not only in sorting out the respective jurisdictional rights of the secular and church courts, but also sought to define the proper way in which a church court should exercise its jurisdiction. Proceedings began in 1458 and continued until 1461. Among other claims, royal officials accused the church court of excessive regulation and punishment of the laity.Footnote 81 Most pertinently, they alleged that the court cited many married men and women for adultery without the accusation of the other spouse, even when there was no scandal, and that they inflicted the alleged offenders with heavy fines.Footnote 82
Church officials fought to maintain their jurisdiction over adultery, but fought a losing battle. The efforts of Archbishop of Reims Jean Jouvenel des Ursins are notable not only for offering further evidence of this struggle, but for the argument adopted by the archbishop in defense of church jurisdiction over adultery. In a complaint addressed to Charles VII written, according to Nöel Valois, before 1452, the archbishop claimed that secular courts refused to allow church courts to prosecute even notoriously adulterous married women, “ribauldes mariées.” Moreover, he maintained, secular courts did not punish such adulterers themselves, despite both the ancient laws that called for their execution and also the “new” secular laws that punished adulterers with public beatings.Footnote 83 Citing Saint Paul, the archbishop then insisted once again on church jurisdiction over adultery.Footnote 84 Saint Paul had indisputably condemned adultery, but royal jurists were no longer willing to allow church courts any further criminal prosecution of the offence.
By the close of the fifteenth century, royal courts had effectively wrested criminal jurisdiction over adultery away from local church courts.Footnote 85 In this new order, French church courts might adjudicate a case in which a spouse sought a legal separation—the right to separate property or to set up a separate residence—on the grounds of adultery, but nothing more.Footnote 86 Jurists championing the powers of royal courts asserted this royal privilege with confidence, citing as support for the “ancient” division of secular and ecclesiastical jurisdiction the royal ordonnances issued in 1336 and 1388 against the Bishop of Amiens, and referring as well to the jurisdictional privileges accorded French secular courts by the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, issued in 1438 by King Charles VII.Footnote 87 Increasingly, Parlement also sought to impose its authority upon local secular courts, severely restraining both municipal and seignorial judicial authorities.Footnote 88 At least in some parts of Northern France, such as the frontier region of Amiens, efforts to curtail seigniorial and municipal courts would continue into the early sixteenth century.Footnote 89
Additionally, the way in which adultery could be criminally prosecuted changed. Courts were no longer to act on rumor or private denunciation. Instead, only notorious adulteresses and their lovers could be prosecuted without a husband or father's accusation.Footnote 90 If husbands did not accuse their adulterous wives, they could still be prosecuted in certain circumstances, again in keeping with the dictates of Roman Law that the jurists selectively quoted and praised. For example, long abandoned wives suspected of adultery could be prosecuted, especially if pregnant. Wives whose husbands were suspected of acting as panderers, as pimps to their wives, could also be prosecuted without their husband's accusation. Punishment, as we have seen, was monastic enclosure for wives, with banishment and even execution possible in cases seen as particularly egregious, such as adultery between a noblewoman and her servant, or in cases in which an adulterous wife conspired to kill her husband.Footnote 91 Wives' lovers could be sentenced to banishment, galley service, or execution. Husbands, meanwhile, had new and ample protections from prosecution for adultery beyond this provision. Wives could not proceed criminally against their husbands, but could only sue in a civil suit, and only in extremely limited circumstances. Following Roman law, a wife was only allowed to initiate criminal proceedings against a husband who brought his mistress into their home, and also seriously mistreated his wife.Footnote 92
The arrival of this gender difference in prosecution as well as these harsh punishments for wives and their male lovers both offer an extremely important contrast to the fifteenth century. Punishments such as enclosure or execution were not applied in every case. Nor do royal courts seem to have achieved exclusive jurisdiction instantly. To return to the example of Amiens, the secular courts did continue to fine at least some men for adultery in the early sixteenth century.Footnote 93 That said, even though some men were still fined for adultery in the sixteenth century, what had changed, and quite dramatically, was the context for those prosecutions. In fifteenth century Northern France, a fine was the worst punishment likely to be inflicted by a court for adultery, for a man or a woman. By the sixteenth century, this was no longer the case. As Isabelle Paresys wrote, the fact that men were fined for adultery in the sixteenth century reveals how minor an infraction male adultery was by the standards of that time.Footnote 94 Far worse punishment was reserved for adulterous wives and their lovers.Footnote 95
But why did these changes take place? The royal assertion of jurisdiction is in some ways easy to explain, although further research would answer some outstanding questions.Footnote 96 Royal courts sought in every way to expand their powers at this time, and to curtail those powers that other courts held. In particular, the crown severely limited church powers in France, including the right to appeal a case to Rome and the appointment of ecclesiastical officials.Footnote 97 Royal courts also sought to limit church court competence to purely “spiritual” matters, and to restrict the powers of church courts to act against members of the laity.Footnote 98 Adultery is only one small example, in the midst of many broader jurisdictional disputes that the royal courts won.Footnote 99 It is certainly the case that royal courts sought exclusive jurisdiction over adultery prosecution as part of a larger effort to assert and expand its powers.
Nevertheless, the royal jurists left church jurisdiction untouched in other areas, and we still must ask why adultery was included in their larger program. As Claude Gauvard explains, royal jurists claimed they wanted adultery punished with more severity than found with the local courts that punished with fines.Footnote 100 As for why royal courts wished to punish adulterers harshly, Gauvard suggests that they wanted to use such punishments to discourage husbands from killing their adulterous wives by providing a sufficiently harsh alternative.Footnote 101 Royal jurists certainly, as Gauvard has repeatedly emphasized, had a general interest in preventing private vengeance. However, as several scholars, including Gauvard, have found, spousal homicide for adultery was extremely rare in the fifteenth century, with husbands several times more likely, if they killed over adultery at all, to kill their wives' lovers in lieu of their wives.Footnote 102 Moreover, an interest in the prevention of private vengeance does not explain why royal officials and jurists wanted to exempt husbands from punishment for adultery. As will be explained in more detail below, another explanation suggested by Gauvard, that of an interest in bolstering the family unit, merits further consideration.Footnote 103
The doctrinal changes in the definition of adultery and how it was to be punished are even more difficult to understand than the royal seizure of jurisdiction over adultery. We know of a larger transformation in these jurists' approach to law, most notably their publication, increasingly in the vernacular, of important cases and treatises on the law, unveiling the mysteries of their work for the public, or at least the literate public, eye.Footnote 104 We know that the law and practices regarding adultery were changing before these books were published beginning in the 1520s, but we have no more precise information as of yet as to when, and we are certainly equally in the dark as to, precisely, why. For Papon, at least, the punishment of monastic confinement was appropriate as part of the Roman law, which, once stripped of its medieval apparatus, was so prized by the early legal humanists, who called for its strict enforcement.Footnote 105 That said, jurists such as Papon did not adopt all of Roman Law any more than royal courts claimed all the powers of local courts. Some picking and choosing took place, and Papon and like-minded jurists saw something that they wanted in this Roman law treatment of adultery. Moreover, many royal jurists had other reasons for wanting to assert husbandly authority. The church, after all, was not the only institution whose power the Crown sought to diminish in France. Powerful extended families served as another target, and political theorists encouraged the breakdown of these families in favor of the nuclear family, tightly controlled by a husband whom they envisaged as a domestic monarch. Allowing husbands to regulate their wives' adultery as they chose, without judicial intervention, offered husbands a powerful tool to these greater political ends.Footnote 106
Whatever their motivations, it is clear that these jurists detested the sin and crime of adultery, a horror shared by Protestant and Catholic alike. Far from deeming the punishment of adultery as too harsh, they detested what they saw as lax and intermittent prosecutions.Footnote 107 Jean de Coras, judge, jurist, and soon-to-be Protestant martyr, described judges who punished adultery too leniently as “more Turk than Christian.”Footnote 108 Nevertheless, the changes instituted by these adultery-hating jurists made adultery much harder to punish, leniently or otherwise. Above all, they had greatly restricted the ability of courts to catch and prosecute adulterous husbands.
This was quite intentional. Papon, for his part, offers explanation both for the use of monastic confinement and for the emphasis on female punishment. If we are to take Papon at his word, the near decriminalization of a husband's adultery and the newly emphasized punishment of adulterous wives seemed appropriate for some very old reasons, reasons that had long been given in all manner of texts but not acted upon in late-medieval Northern French practice. Papon admitted freely that he and his contemporaries punished adulterous wives, but did not equally punish husbands. They did so, he explained, because the chastity of the wife is more important than that of her husband, especially as she could become pregnant with another man's child.Footnote 109 Only a wife's adultery risked the introduction of an illegitimate child into her husband's lineage. The great thirteenth century theologian Thomas Aquinas and several other medieval theologians and canonists had made the same claim, but Papon and his colleagues acted on their objections to a wife's extramarital liaisons, and radically redefined the rules by which French courts judged and punished adultery.Footnote 110
Although Papon and his colleagues thus instituted a transformation in the prosecution of adultery, their policies nevertheless reflected some older attitudes toward illicit sex, and some older misogyny. Fifteenth century writers and artists did not by any means display a purely favorable attitude toward women.Footnote 111 On the contrary, they commonly portrayed women as temptresses: if men were held responsible for all that they and women did in bed, women were the ones who lured them there. To take the literature and artwork produced for the fifteenth century trend-setting Burgundian court as one example, we find in it both Gerson's moral teachings on the appropriate behavior of husbands as well as in misogynistic attacks on women by other authors.Footnote 112 As Renée Pigeaud has argued, a distinct urban morality developed in the towns and cities of fifteenth century Northern Europe, and this morality, which set high standards for appropriate male behavior, and censured their misbehavior, considered women to be dangerous temptresses.Footnote 113 The literature, drama, and visual arts produced by this urban culture consistently recounted the downfall of men at the hands of the women they could not resist. Time and again, artists and writers of this milieu rendered the undoing of Old Testament patriarchs such as Samson, Solomon, and David, great men who had all been overwhelmed by lust.Footnote 114 King David and Bathsheba, and Bathsheba at her bath in particular, served as the subject of a vast corpus of late medieval French manuscript illumination.Footnote 115 Certainly it could well be that our sixteenth century jurists, the urban denizens of Paris, Dijon, and Toulouse, partook of that urban morality, and that it informed their decision to adopt the Romano-canonical Law and allow husbands to forcibly confine their adulterous wives.
The presence in late medieval culture of both of these rather contradictory ideas of men and women, with their different implications for what male or female adultery meant, led me to suggest that two very different ideas of the institution of marriage underlay these two different understandings of adultery. Fifteenth century local court practice, with its emphasis on punishing husbands for adultery, and punishing that adultery with fines rather than enclosure, banishment, or execution, belonged to a world that put primary emphasis on what Saint Augustine called the “good” of indissoluble lifelong marriage.Footnote 116 Court officials thought of marriage as deeply sacramental, intended to resemble the indissoluble marriage of Christ to Church. Prioritizing indissolubility in marriage, in the fifteenth century, these officials saw adultery as a wrong to be punished, but not as an end to a marriage. After fines were paid, spouses should reconcile and resume conjugal life. This kind of marriage, as indissoluble as the union of Christ and Church, also had to mirror the hierarchical relationship of Christ as superior guide to his spouse, an inferior and subservient Church. This model, as preached by Jean Gerson, treated husbands, the stand-ins for Christ, as household heads and, therefore, responsible for their wives' behavior as well as their own. This theological commitment could explain why these courts so eagerly punished husbands for falling so far short of Christ's example. Once a husband had paid his fine, he was urged to return to his wife. This prosecution of husbands—and some wives—for adultery quite closely resembles church courts' typical handling of the illicit sex of clergy. Just as these courts frequently fined husbands in lieu of their mistresses, so too did these courts fine clergy far more often than their “housekeepers.”Footnote 117 The resemblance is not a coincidence. For the court officials who adhered to this understanding of marriage, a husband played the same role in his household as a priest played in his parish. Both had responsibility for their own salvation as well as their wife or parishioners, and both were to blame when anyone of them strayed from the chastity they owed to God, particularly what they themselves owed God as upstanding Christian men.
In sixteenth century France, marriage and the family mattered just as much, but they mattered in different ways. The writings of French jurists on adultery reflect broader humanistic arguments that called for something of a secularization of marriage, appropriate in the age of John Calvin and Martin Luther. Catholic or Protestant, many French humanists agreed with Calvin and Luther on the importance of parental consent to their children's marriages as well as an increased role for secular authorities in the regulation of marriage, particularly on questions of adultery. In the early sixteenth century, some humanists, even devout Catholics, began to question the sacramental quality of marriage, especially clandestine marriages. Some called for the right to divorce and remarry in certain limited situations such as adultery, sorcery, or childlessness, thus challenging the supremacy of indissolubility in marriage that had held sway in previous centuries. These humanists preferred instead to prioritize fidelity, procreation, and the responsibility owed to one's parents to marry only with their consent.Footnote 118 All this influenced, and was influenced by, the French legal humanists, many of whom would, in fact, later leave the Catholic Church.Footnote 119 To Protestants or Catholics, in their understanding of marriage, a woman's adultery mattered much more than a husband's, as only her adultery was understood as creating the opportunity for the introduction of other men's children into her husband's family.Footnote 120 Moreover, a wife's adultery deeply dishonored her husband.Footnote 121 As the widely influential French humanist François Rabelais had his memorable character Panurge complain to the equally memorable Pantagruel, Panurge longed for the companionship of marriage, and longed as well for legitimate sons and daughters to perpetuate his name, but the certainty of being cuckolded terrified him.Footnote 122 In addition to posing threats to the patriline and to male honor, a wife's adultery also posed a challenge to her husband's authority over her. A wife's dalliance, unlike that of her husband's, not only broke their conjugal faith, but also threatened the authority of a superior authority over his inferior. All this seemed to call for harsher punishment for wives. The use of the monastery to punish female adultery, therefore, although it looked Christian, had more of the Roman than the Catholic in its implementation, restoring the Roman notion that only a wife's extramarital affairs counted as adultery. For sixteenth century French legal humanists, a husband's liaison with an unmarried woman, less of a threat to their understanding of marriage, could go unpunished, as it had in Ancient Rome and in Late Antiquity. Such an act was not adultery but “mere stumprum” as Papon termed it.Footnote 123 A male lover might be punished, but a husband who visited his mistress, as long as she had no husband to accuse her and her lover of adultery, no longer ran any risk of the door being broken down by officers eager to drag him to prison and fine him. For these royal jurists and for the humanists whom they drew their inspiration from, just as kings and royal courts should dominate France, French husbands and householders ought to be left undisturbed to manage their own households, and their wives, as they saw fit.
We should not leave behind the sixteenth century without a few words about the complexities of its own legal practice, complexities that unquestionably merit future study. The use of enclosure and the emphasis on punishment of women seem clear enough, but a closer look at court records may yet reveal some nuance.Footnote 124 For example, although Jean Papon and several other jurists describe the beating and enclosure of Marie Quatrelivres, what actually happened to her is rather more complicated. Papon accurately described the judgment handed down by the Paris Parlement, but that judgment is far from the whole story. As told in the Journal d'un bourgeois de Paris published in 1536,Footnote 125 Marie Quatrelivres was daughter of an advocate of the Paris Parlement and the wife of Louis Ruzé, the civil lieutenant of the Châtelet, a court with jurisdiction over much of Paris. Early in the morning on June 10, 1521, Marie fled her husband's house while he was away from Paris. She decamped in the company of two brothers and her chambermaid, bringing with her two horses, some jewelry, and lots of clothing. The brothers were the sons of a deceased lieutenant of the bailiff of Orléans. The elder partnered with Marie and the younger brother with the beautiful chambermaid. The abandoned husband, not only wealthy and powerful, also seems to have counted among his friends the great legal humanist Guillaume Budé who wrote Ruzé a remarkable letter congratulating him on his freedom from such a wife who, having departed, could no longer dishonor him.Footnote 126 We do not know if Ruzé took any comfort from his influential friend's message, but we do know that Ruze's wife, her lover, and her travelling companions remained together for 3 months and then returned to Paris, where they were arrested.
Ruzé brought a criminal suit against Marie to the Châtelet. He accused her not only of adultery and theft, but also of prior incestuous adultery with his nephew. According to the bourgeois, Marie's husband and his family had decided to add the latter charge to the list of crimes that he could attribute to her in order to better increase his chances of getting her property.Footnote 127 Marie was duly detained in a convent while awaiting trial. At the close of this trial, on June 6, 1522, the court ordered Marie to seek pardon from her husband in front of ten witnesses, and sentenced her to 3 years of penance in the convent of the Cordeliers of Paris. During those 3 years, they gave Marie's husband the right to see her and have marital relations with her. The brothers Marie had run off with, accused of abduction and theft, were acquitted by the court, but were ordered to pay the legal costs. We can understand that Ruzé might wish to appeal such a lenient sentence, but in fact, all of the parties appealed the case to the Paris Parlement.Footnote 128 This time, on the December 23, 1522, Marie was deprived of all her property in favor of her husband and sentenced to whipping, cutting off of her hair, and formal, permanent enclosure in the convent of her choice with a pension of 80 livres for her support and clothing, which her husband was to provide. The court ordered the brothers to return to Marie's husband what goods he claimed had been stolen from him, but did not otherwise punish them. So far, the information we have about the sentence of Parlement matches the description repeatedly cited by Jean Papon and many other jurists, if considerably enhanced by more details and more color. This, however, was far from the end of the story.
As the bourgeois explained, Marie immediately sought clemency from King François I, and obtained it. Nicolas Versoris, advocate of the Paris Parlement, confirmed much of this in his account of his experiences as advocate at the Parlement, and added that Marie went to live, not in a convent, but in a reputable home, monitored by an honorable widow.Footnote 129 To offer explanation as to why all of this happened, Philippe Hamon situated the case in its political, social, and familial context.Footnote 130 He pointed to rivalries between Parisian families that dominated the courts, such as Marie's natal family, and the high-ranking families of the Loire who served as royal officers for King François I, men such as Marie's husband. Hamon attributed Marie's pardon to conflict between the king and his Parlement, to the king's interest in imposing his will upon his court. Barbara Diefendorf, meanwhile, suggests that the pardon may have had more to do with a potentially telling different perceptions of the gravity of female adultery. As Diefendorf suggests, the men of Parlement wanted to inflict harsh punishment on Marie, but the “cavalier attitude of the king” reflected far more indulgence on his part towards women who, like her, “who showed more spirit than character.”Footnote 131
Marie and her husband formally reconciled in 1526, but he died a few months later.Footnote 132 The story does not end there either, however. In 1532, Marie was to be found at the convent for penitent, reformed prostitutes in Paris.Footnote 133 Evidently Marie had been caught inside an all-male monastery with a reputation for licentiousness, and she was enclosed in the convent for reformed prostitutes as punishment. We do not know what the terms of her enclosure were, but we do know that she was not content to stay there long. Marie left the convent in 1534 and remarried, this time to a nobleman, Jean de Saint-Saturny. Hamon suggests that the nobleman may have been in pecuniary difficulties, difficulties that Marie—with money of her own and with a generous pension recently given by François I—could rectify. One might imagine a kind of resolution of the story here, with married life rediscovered, but Marie had not finished defying legal and social mores. Two years later, we find Marie, inexplicably described as the “so-called wife” of Jean de Saint-Saturny, accused of pretending to be pregnant and of having bribed another woman to give her a baby that she pretended was her own. To escape punishment, Marie fled Paris once again, again in the company of her chambermaid. As she refused to appear for trial, Marie was sentenced to having an effigy of herself decapitated on the pillory in Paris and the confiscation of her property.Footnote 134 A letter of remission, however, saved her once more.Footnote 135
Obviously this is an exceptional case, and obviously not all adulterous women could count on the royal clemency Marie took repeated advantage of. Other men did succeed in enclosing their wives, and the courts sentenced other adulteresses to exile, public punishment, and even execution. Nevertheless, what I intend all this to mean for the purpose of this article, at least, is to suggest that the handling of adultery by sixteenth century courts, like those of the fifteenth century, deserves a much closer look. Just as we can no longer assume that medieval French courts punished women with enclosure, we must also treat with caution the texts of jurists such as Jean Papon. Even as the sixteenth-century jurists record summaries of actual judgments, we are still operating at a certain distance from legal practice.
Conclusion
The handling of adultery played an important part in the many ways in which law and legal practice in France transformed at the close of the fifteenth century. Late medieval French court officials cared about adultery, but they did not appear to care for punishing it by the enclosure of the guilty wife or by inflicting harsh punishments. Instead, fifteenth century ecclesiastical and even secular courts punished male adulterers with fines, and only more rarely prosecuted and fined adulterous women. Such practices do not accord with the classical canonists' focus on punishment of wives, nor with their discussion of enclosure as appropriate punishment for adultery. These practices did, however, comply with the Catholic doctrine that insisted on viewing adultery as a crime whether committed by a husband or by a wife. By the sixteenth century, a married man's liaison with an unmarried woman no longer counted as adultery in French secular courts. Meanwhile, a husband could and did seek the enclosure of his adulterous wife. Such prosecutions were accompanied by much harsher sentences of banishment, galley service for male lovers, and in some cases, such as a sexual relationship between a woman and her male servant, even execution.Footnote 136
Such harsh punishment, focused on wives and their lovers, represents a striking contrast to the picture, admittedly fragmentary, that I have drawn of adultery in the fifteenth century. It is easy to dismiss the insistence of medieval, Catholic doctrine that husbands, too, refrain from adultery, in a time and place known to treat female sexuality as different—and far more dangerous—than male sexuality. However, Catholic insistence on the sanctity and indissolubility of marriage, indissoluble regardless of adultery, appears to have had real resonance in fifteenth century Northern France. Canonists of the classical period focused on the punishment of adulterous wives, but late-medieval French legal practice took seriously the rule that husbands, too, could not commit adultery, and focused on restraining them, not their wives. In the sixteenth century, French jurists rejected this approach, and rejected as well the intrusive role played by local courts in criminal adultery prosecution. Legal humanists detested adultery, but detested it above all when committed by a wife, whose liaison threatened that she might pass her lover's child off as one of her husband's, as well as threatening her husband's authority over his wife and his household. These jurists transformed the handling of adultery into much more of an assertion of patriarchal values, reinforcing a double standard that legal practitioners of the fifteenth century at least briefly defied.
