Definition
The incapacity to bear or beget children; sterility. In law, barrenness carries significance primarily in the context of marriage: where barrenness results from impotence or a physical incapacity that existed at the time the marriage was entered into, it has historically constituted a ground for annulment or dissolution of the marriage. The condition must typically be permanent and pre-existing at the time of the marriage — not a later-arising infertility — for it to have legal consequence.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "The property of being barren; the property of not supporting life." Used broadly of land, environments, or ideas lacking productivity.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The condition of being barren; sterility; unproductiveness." Equally broad, applied to land, imagination, and persons alike.
The common meaning is wide and figurative — barren land, barren ideas. The legal meaning is narrow and clinical: an incapacity to reproduce that, when present at the time of marriage, may have legal consequences for the validity of that union. A researcher encountering "barrenness" in a legal source should not import the figurative sense.
Common Confusion
Barrenness is frequently conflated with impotence in historical legal sources, and the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably. They are not identical. Impotence refers specifically to the incapacity for sexual intercourse, while barrenness refers to the incapacity to produce a child. Historically, courts and treatises often collapsed the distinction because the operative legal concern was whether the marriage could be consummated and issue produced — but modern legal analysis treats these as separate questions. A person may be capable of intercourse but incapable of reproduction, and vice versa. Researchers should check which incapacity is actually at issue in any given source.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is essentially dormant in modern legal usage. It appears almost exclusively in historical sources — annulment proceedings, ecclesiastical court records, and 19th-century domestic relations treatises — and should be treated as a period artifact rather than a live legal concept.
Several traps await the researcher working in historical sources. First, the ecclesiastical origins of marriage dissolution law mean that early American cases and treatises on this topic often borrow heavily from canon law, where the conceptual framework differs from secular common law. Bouvier's citation to Fodéré's Médecine Légale signals that this was as much a medical-legal question as a purely legal one — courts of the period relied on medical testimony to establish the condition.
Second, the distinction between annulment and divorce matters here. Barrenness as a pre-existing condition goes to the validity of the marriage itself — it is an annulment ground, not a divorce ground — because it speaks to a defect present at formation. A researcher who conflates annulment and divorce grounds in historical sources will misread the doctrine entirely.
Third, the condition's legal relevance depended heavily on proof of pre-existence. A marriage could not be dissolved on grounds of barrenness if the incapacity arose after the marriage was formed. Historical records involving this term may therefore include significant medical evidence and expert testimony that would be unusual in other domestic relations proceedings.
The stray phrase "two mines" appearing in one version of Black's definition is a printing artifact — a typesetting error from a neighboring entry that crept into the text. It carries no legal meaning and should be disregarded.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three historical sources agree on the core definition: barrenness is sterility, the incapacity to bear or produce children. Black's (both editions) offers nothing beyond that bare formulation. Bouvier adds the legally operative dimension — that barrenness arising from impotence existing at the time of marriage constitutes a cause for dissolution — and provides the only substantive doctrinal content across these sources.
The historical dictionaries are thin on this term, which reflects its narrow and specialized function. Neither edition of Black's explains when or how barrenness becomes legally actionable; Bouvier's is more useful but still skeletal. Researchers needing substantive doctrine will need to move beyond these dictionary entries to treatises on domestic relations and marriage law, particularly 19th-century texts dealing with ecclesiastical inheritance in American annulment law.
Jurisdictional Note
Annulment grounds vary by state, and most modern American jurisdictions do not enumerate barrenness by name as a ground for annulment. Where the concept survives, it tends to appear under broader statutory language covering fraud, concealment of material facts, or incapacity. Researchers applying historical doctrine to a specific jurisdiction should verify whether and how the state's annulment statutes absorbed or discarded this ground.