Two weddings and a lawsuit: Marriage litigation in fourteenth-century Portugal

Based on one of the few surviving records of marriage cases brought before ecclesiastical courts in fourteenth-century Portugal, this article offers a rare glimpse of marriage practice in a small village in a remote corner of Western Europe and the complex ties that bound its inhabitants and which secular and ecclesiastical authorities sought to regulate. Clear parallels can be drawn with the patterns of marriage litigation observed in England and Northern France, but evidence also suggests that royal legislation played an important part in the resolution of marital disputes and in the shaping of conjugal behaviour.