I'm hardly qualified to comment on late fifteenth/early sixteenth century German marriage practices, but the reasoning presented in that passage is baffling. Skipping right past the frankly odd idea that people treat marriage like they do economics (and the inevitable problem of what the Catholic Church would say), his argument that the Hundred Years War so thoroughly wracked the male population of Germany that it was forced to adopt new marriage practices is patently false. Germany wasn't even a major party in the Hundred Years War!

The Hundred Years War (actually a series of wars/related conflicts bundled together by historians) was fought primarily between England and France from 1337-1453. While there was some involvement by outside parties, most famously there were several battles in Spain and the King of Bohemia died at the Battle of Crecy in 1346, involvement from across the Alps was always a minor component. There's no way an entire generation would have been wiped out by the war. Most of the conflict was fought in France and even then only certain regions of France suffered from extreme deprivation and destruction. Most of the worst parts of the war for the French populace were actually the early stages (1337-1360) when English tactics emphasized pillage and raiding (called chevauchee tactics). In the fifteenth century Henry V mostly tried for more peaceful conquest, I say mostly because he still did some raiding and his attempts to limit pillaging were not entirely successful.

The reasoning behind this argument is easily one of the most bizarre I've ever encountered. For a good general history of the Hundred Years War, and many of the social issues around it, I recommend David Green's The Hundred Years War: A People's History, which I will add has no section dedicated to German population loss or Germany in general.

I think I know where he's getting the idea.

As necessary background, the later Middle Ages were zealous about the strength and permanence of the marriage bond. We can even see ambivalent attitudes towards the acceptability of remarrying after the death of a spouse.

The word "polygamy" today conjures up the stereotypical picture of one husband living with multiple wives in the same house or in nearby homes as one family (unified or segmented). TV cop show fans will also recognize the inevitable plot-of-the-week with the man who leads a double life and is married in each one. Bigamia in the Middle Ages would have referred to both of these situations, of course.

But this context, I believe, is referring to a different type of bigamia. Husbands would go off to war, and then...not come home. Were they dead? Were they coming home? What was the wife supposed to do, especially if she couldn't support herself? This was a major concern for the Church. (Bigamy was actually an ecclesiastical and secular crime). Popes and synods repeatedly decreed that wives needed official proof of their husbands' deaths in war in order to remarry, like Raymond of Penafort (ca 1275) wanting an oath from the husband's commander in battle that he really, truly had died. The listed punishments were severe, from multiyear exile to execution. But canon law following Gratian actually recommended leniency for women who married out of the belief that their husbands had died, recognizing the impossible situation they were in.

Sara McDougall has shown, however, that women tended to be prosecuted much more rarely for bigamy than men: it was a crime gendered male in much the way that adultery was gendered female. (Probably, again, for practical reasons). Specifically studying the time period in question--the middle of the 15th century, she writes that women were just as often "up to something that greatly resembled bigamy," but it did not result in punishment the way men's behavior did. The cases she identified with men being prosecuted were not female soldiers, of course, but husbands and wives separated when they fled the ravages of war. The women who engaged in bigamy-like behavior and were not punished, represent wives of MIA soldiers.

I'm guessing that this is what your author has misinterpreted as "one generation legalization of polygamy." German states...well...I guess he can misinterpret France, too. It miiiight be some wildly misremembered reference to the mess involving Philip von Hesse in/after the Reformation, but it's probably just an error among errors.

Tag /u/Valkine :)