Conviction and necessity in the reform of marital law during the era of the French Reformation and wars of religion

• Main Author: Ford, Jeffrey Eugene
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Subjects: history of science; history, modern; women's studies

In this dissertation, Jeffrey Ford examines the shifts in French marital law and theory that occurred in sixteenth-century France. The organization of the thesis is rather straightforward. The first chapter examines the historiography associated with legal change in early modern France. The second chapter treats the nature of marriage in early modern Europe. The third and fourth chapters discuss the failure of ecclesiastical reform and the subsequent effort to reform French marital law by the temporal authority. The fifth chapter discusses legal theorists whose works defended the new direction in marital law. Finally, the thesis notes how seventeenth century French legal theorists codified the new laws and ideas of marriage.
The central point of this work is that marriage law began to move from the ecclesiastical jurisdiction in Catholic France to the temporal power for two reasons. First, the French monarchy decided that its proposed curtailment of clandestine marriage was not going to be accepted by the Council of Trent, leaving a serious legal and social problem unaddressed. Second, as France divided into warring factions after the 1560's, the French monarchy needed to find a way to insure the legal validity of Protestant marriages. Rebellious Protestant nobles would have no incentive to make peace as long as the legal rights of their heirs might be placed in doubt. French monarchs addressed these two problems by passing a series of edicts which began to bring marital law under temporal control, though claiming to do so as the advocates of divine law.
The sources for this thesis are two-fold. First, the author relies on the codes of French law as complied by two eighteenth century authors (Le Ridant and Gibert). Second, Ford examines several sixteenth-century treatises on marital law which debated clandestine marriage, impotency, divorce, and marriage customs by authors like Jean de Coras, Guillaume Mellier, Antoine Hotman, Jean Marconville, and Vincent Tagereau.