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114 Chapter 2
Lombardi (writing about Florence at the end of the period and in
the subsequent one):
If we consider the cases as a whole, it becomes evident that people did not
for the most part have recourse to the tribunal for the purpose of breaking
a matrimonial bond. More numerous were the cases which had to do with
the formation of the bond.
Donahue:
My own research has focussed on England and France. Anne Lefebvre
has surveyed the surviving records from late medieval France. Professor
Weigand and Klaus Lindner have worked on Germany. An international
group on ecclesiastical court records has produced reports on the surviving
records of Austria, Belgium, France, Hungary, The Netherlands,
and Switzerland, and has made some preliminary soundings in Germany,
Spain and Italy. While the patterns of these records and of their survival
vary markedly from country to country, and considerably more work in situ
needs to be done, the conclusions about incest cases that Helmholz and
Sheehan arrived at on the basis [of] a relatively small sample of English
cases have held up remarkably well: Incest cases do not comprise a large
portion of the marriage business of the medieval church courts. There are
somesuchcases....Thenumber...however,palesincomparisonwith
the number of instance cases in which one party is seeking to enforce a
marriage legitimately—as he or she alleges—entered into or to obtain a
separation on the ground of adultery or cruelty, or in comparison with
the number of ex ocio prosecutions of fornication or adultery. . . . First,
the search has now been extended widely enough and has covered enough
di·erent types and levels of courts that we are probably safe in arguing
that the records are not there. Second, with a bit more hesitancy, we can
probably argue that the records never were there, i.e., that the sample is
wide enough and the circumstances of its survival peculiar enough that we
D. Lombardi, Matrimoni di antico regime (Annali dell’Istituto storico italogermanico
in Trento, Monografie, 34; Bologna, 2001), 171 (my translation). Cf. ibid.
175: ‘il numero delle cause di nullit›a resta comunque limitato, finch‹e, a partire dal
ventennio 1670–1689, sparisce del tutto. Ne possiamo forse dedurre che il principio
di indissolubilit›a si fosse profondamente radicato nelle coscienze dei fedeli, oltre che
tra i guidici, sensibili alle esigenze di salvaguardia del vincolo.’
Donahue means cases involving the forbidden degrees of kinship (consanguinity
and anity). I am not sure that the word incest in the sense that anthropologists
use it, or indeed in the everyday sense, captures the way it was regarded in this period:
except where very close kinship was concerned, the rules were seen increasingly as
designed to produce on the aggregate a sociologically desirable harmony between
extended families, rather than moral absolutes barring the way to pollution. See
D. L. d’Avray, ‘Lay Kinship Solidarity and Papal Law’, in P. Sta·ord, J. L. Nelson,
and J. Martindale (eds.), Law, Laity and Solidarities: Essays in Honour of Susan
Reynolds (Manchester, 2001), 188–99.