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Bigamy 167
Both these cases are from Spain. Perhaps clerical status made
even more di·erence there than elsewhere. The tangible and intangible
advantages of legitimately married clerics is a subject crying
out for more research. One would like to know, for instance, how
much di·erence if any clerical status made to secular financial obligations
to local and central government in the various regions of
Europe. The intangible advantages should not be forgotten either.
Married clerics had a special status in the Weberiansense: they were
set apart from other laypeople in their own and other people’s estimation.
A first step, however, would be to investigate systematically
the practical pay-o·s.
The more we learn about the advantages married clerics enjoyed
over other married men, the more we should appreciate the social
relevance of marriage symbolism. These advantages were forfeited
by remarriage, marriage to a widow, even marriage to a woman
no longer a virgin, and the rationale for that was the symbolic
defectiveness of the clerics’ marriage. For by the thirteenth century,
when the rule about clerics in minor orders was laid down, the
symbolic grounds for the rules seem solidly established.
Bigamy and the Wife of Bath
Chaucer scholars could learn something from reflection on these
developments. Much has been written about the Wife of Bath’s last
husband, Jankyn, and the ‘Book of Wicked Wives’ with which he
nourished a sturdy anti-feminism. Scholars seem not to have made
the following connections, of which it seems likely that Chaucer
was aware. The husband in question had been a ‘clerk’ (cleric) of
Oxford. The Wife of Bath had got through several husbands before
him, and when the Oxford man married her he was automatically
declassified from clerical status. Some of Chaucer’s contemporary
readers would surely have been more attuned to these implications
than modern literary scholars.
‘Bigamy’ is an elegant illustration of the thesis that life a·ected
marriage symbolism and marriage symbolism life. Consummation
is another such case.