Breaking Up the Conjugal Union: Concubinage, Gender, and Honor in the Late Medieval Mediterranean

Fourteenth-century episcopal visitation records and ecclesiastical and secular court cases from Iberia, southern France, and Italy show that a surprising number of married men and women left the marital home to form a new domestic union. The importance that historians have given to marriage in the lives of late medieval people often obscures the fact that concubinage and marital separation loomed large as a lived experience for people at the lowest levels of medieval society. Despite the indissoluble and sacramental view of marriage imposed by the medieval Church since the twelfth century, married couples practiced self-divorce and engaged in concubinage. A concubinous union offered unhappy married couples an exit strategy that did not entail petitioning the church court for a legal separation, which was costly and meant that they were prohibited from remarrying and expected to live celibately.

Stepping out on a spouse to commit adultery, particularly for men, was common, but it was another thing entirely to forsake a spouse and break the familial, social, and economic bonds of marriage. This paper offers a statistical analysis of the interplay between gender and spousal desertion and considers how successful couples were in leaving their marriages and starting anew. It also asks a number of questions that deal with honor and the integration of a new union into the community. What if one spouse moved on and the other did not; did the deserted spouse leave the parish or town in shame? Normally we think of the cuckolded husband, but the abandonment of a wife affected her honor and status in the community. Did her survival, then, depend on entering into a concubinous union? What if both parties agreed to separate and found new partners? What happened to the children? Could these new family units live together in the same village?