Multiple Marriages

If the clergy could not legally marry at all, some laymen redressed the balance by marrying many times. While this was legally permitted, of course, so long as the multiple marriages followed one another in sequence, both civil and Church authorities penalized those who took more than one spouse at a time.

handful of cities adopted statutes prohibiting bigamous marriages and imposing penalties upon offenders; the usual punishment involved a substantial fine, al­though at Reggio Emilia, bigamy was made a capital crime if the second mar­riage was consummated. At Belluno the bigamist who failed to pay his £200 fine within a month could be castrated; he might also lose one hand to the execu­tioner.^[2009] Women were not usually punished for bigamy at all, a fact that Jean Montaigne put down to the well-known frailty of their sex; it may also have been a result of the fact that in many cases the woman was unaware that her husband still had another living wife.^[2010]

The Church continued to consider sequential or constructive bigamy an ob­stacle to ordination, but more boisterous and immediate reaction to the remar­riage of widows and widowers was likely to come from young people, who, de­spite continuing censures from both Church and civic authorities, continued to intimidate and harass couples with charivaris or, as they were known in Tuscany, scampanate. These youthful brigades found plenty of victims, for wid­owers and widows made up a substantial part of city populations during this period, and many widowers remarried, almost always to younger women. Al­though this often earned them the dubious attentions of local youth groups, the young men could generally be persuaded to abandon their tambourines, rattles, and horns in return for a suitable offering from their victims.^[2011]