A 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. Two states, Minnesota and Georgia have reduced the wait to four years. Italy still seems persuaded by some of the logic of the more rigid medieval jurists. Italians must wait twenty years before a spouse can be declared dead.
McDougall has exploited the Northern French archives for her cases and has presented long excerpts from them in her endnotes and complete cases in an appendix. The texts reveal that the court records were quite standardized with boilerplate sentences describing case after case. That fact certainly does complicate understanding an individual case. She prints full transcriptions of nine cases from the records of the officiality of Troyes dating between 1423 and 1462. These transcriptions are a welcome addition to the material that we have to understand medieval courts. They are difficult, however, to understand. McDougall squeezes as much information from them as is possible. Some historians might argue that she poses too many questions that she cannot answer.
To return to her main thesis that bigamy was as significant a problem in Northern France as clandestine marriage and concubinage, it is not clear that she proved her case in this book. As she acknowledges, clandestine marriages were valid marriages. Although clandestine marriages created many problems for the church and for society, they were not illegal until the Council of Trent outlawed them definitively with the canon Tametsi. If she had found many more cases of bigamy than she did, one would be completely convinced. Reading her book, one asks whether it has always been true that men and women have always abandoned their spouses—and found replacements. Is the fifteenth century an exception? This is not to imply that she has not written a valuable and important study on bigamous marriages.
I have one significant complaint that has nothing to do with the quality of McDougall's work. Having spent many hours reading the book and struggling with the text and the endnotes, I cannot help but express my anger at the editors of the University of Pennsylvania Press for their continuing practice of putting extensive and important notes as endnotes. For the serious reader of the book who wants to verify and evaluate the evidence the author uses, it means frustrating interruptions reading the author's narrative and time-consuming quests to find the sources that the author uses at the back of the book. It is not as if alternatives do not exist (with their own shortcomings). Presses could print books with endnotes but put notes on their websites for readers, or they could print endnotes and also embed them on a CD Rom at the back of the book. Both would work for the short-term future. As it is, presses do a disservice to authors, readers, and scholarship. We should boycott presses who impose this style on us.
