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Bigamy 151
ceremony could be omitted altogether without anything seeming
odd. Where this was the case the analysis that follows is less applicable.
So the remarks that follow are certainly not meant to apply to
Western Christendom generally; and indeed they bear particularly
on England so far as the later Middle Ages are concerned.
So what significant patterns can one observe in the history of
second weddings? For one thing, it looks as though the limitation
on priestly participation became increasingly specific, in the sense
that less and less was forbidden, with the consequence that the
proverbial Martian observer would have found it harder and harder
to tell a first wedding from a second wedding.
Back in the fourth century the contrast between first and second
weddings may have been sharp. The decrees of the Council of Neocaesarea
as transmitted by Dionysius Exiguus seem to ban priests
altogether from participating in second weddings. As for interpretation
of the version in Gratian, Pars II, C. 31, q. 1, cc. 7–8,
there is a problem of textual criticism to complicate things: there
are variant readings, one implying a ban on participation in the
wedding (conubio), another on participation in the banquet (convivio).
Perhaps the di·erence is not so important. Would it make
sense to let a priest conduct a wedding but ban him from the banquet?
More probably, the legislation would be taken to mean that
the priest should just not be involved in a second wedding, though
this is no more than a guess.
The papal decretals from the twelfth century are di·erent and
already more specific. They both forbid the priest to give ‘the blessing’,
whatever that may mean. The natural assumption might be
that ‘the blessing’ is shorthand for the whole celebration of a second
marriage with a religious ritual. It was not, however, so understood,
to judge by the texts printed as Documents 3. 8 and 3. 9, and by
the fascinating discussion in versions of the Sarum Manual.
An interesting and apparently unstudied text can tell us more
about the rituals that went with marriage. The questions on Marriage
in MS BL Royal 11. A. XIV (printed as Document 3. 8)
indicate that there are several blessings at and around a wedding.
(Though this text may survive in only one manuscript and its
T. Dean and K. J. P. Lowe (eds.), Marriage in Italy, 1300–1650 (Cambridge, 1998),
107–15.
See above, p. 141.
See the apparatus critici in Friedberg, Corpus iuris canonici, i. 1110.