Fashioning Widowhood: Bigamy and Remarriage in Sixteenth-Century Spain

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This article studies the conjugal ties between missing husbands and abandoned wives to shed light on the nature of marriage among the people in sixteenthcentury Spain. I argue that while the new regulations introduced by the Catholic Church and the state to institutionalize marriage during the period of the Catholic Reformation and Counter-Reformation impeded people from committing bigamy on the one hand, on the other hand, the same regulations enabled them to create their own new rules so that they could contract a remarriage during the lifetime of their absent spouses. The research carried out for this study showed that such creation of unwritten rules consisted in fashioning widowhood. Abandoned wives broke their marital ties with their missing but probably living spouses by exhibiting representations of their widowhood. The ways in which they fashioned their widowhood changed during the course of the Counter-Reformation. Women fashioned widowhood to convince exclusively the community members during the first half of the sixteenth century, but by the end of the century, it was also meant to dodge the authorities. Thus, when they sought to terminate a marriage, they informed themselves of the Tridentine regulations and arranged it for their own ends. By adopting the official regulations, they convinced both the community members and the authorities that their first marriage was no longer valid.

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  • 人文研紀要

    人文研紀要 100 73-118, 2021-09-30

    中央大学人文科学研究所

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