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142 Chapter 3
If the twice-married person needed to do penance, it seems implied
that there was something morally a little dubious about remarrying.
Indeed that idea existed. Esmein’s classic history of the
canon law of marriage suggests two reasons. One was the rigorist
view of sex that had some currency in the patristic period: if a person
had to get married, once was enough; the other was an ideal
of true monogamy, unspoilt by remarriage. This second reason is
close to the thinking of Brahman Hinduism about remarriage, but
Esmein reminds us that pagan Roman religion had a counterpart
for special cases and that Tacitus attributed a similar attitude to the
Germans (ibid.).
The legitimacy of remarriage
An alternative view and the one that prevailed is that no moral
stigma attached to second marriages. Jerome put that view in no
uncertain terms: not only a second but a fifth or a sixth marriage was
licit. Remarriage after a partner’s death was absolutely normal
throughout the Middle Ages. The papacy had no problem with
that. In the central Middle Ages we find popes (Lucius III and
Alexander IV) banning taxes imposed by abbots or a bishop on the
remarriage of widows. Peter Lombard said succinctly that ‘not
only first or second marriages are licit, but even third and fourth
marriages should not be condemned’. He quoted the passage from
Jerome.
Twelfth-century authorities: Peter Lombard, Gratian, and two papal
decrees
Even so, Lombard did quote a passage from pseudo-Ambrose
(‘Ambrosiaster’), which runs: ‘first marriages only are instituted
by God, whereas second marriages are permitted. And first mar-
Esmein, Le Mariage en droit canonique, ii. 120.
Ibid. 119–21. Cf. Jussen, Der Name der Witwe, 170–1 (granting the substantive
point while stressing negativity about second marriages).
Epist. 48 (ad Pammachium), para. 18 (Migne, PL 22. 508), cited by Ignatius
Brady, the anonymous editor, in Magistri Petri Lombardi Parisiensis Episcopi Sententiae
in IV libris distinctae, 3rd edn., ed. Patres Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras
Aquas (2 vols.; Spicilegium Bonaventurianum, 4–5; Grottaferrata, 1971–81), ii.
Liber III et IV, 509 (listing the letter as number 43—presumably a slip).
Esmein, Le Mariage en droit canonique, ii. 124–5 n. 5. In the same note Esmein
points out that in 1391 the bishop of Chartres armed in Parlement that charivaris
against the remarriage of widows were forbidden by synodal statutes.
Sententiae, 4. 42. 7, ii. 508 Brady.