Definition
Bigamia is the Latin and Law Latin form of the term bigamy, used in historical legal texts, pleadings, and ecclesiastical records to denote the offense of contracting a second marriage while a prior valid marriage remains undissolved. The term appears in medieval and early modern legal writing — particularly in canonical and civil law contexts — and functions as a formal label rather than a term of art distinct from bigamy itself. Researchers encountering bigamia in primary sources should treat it as a direct equivalent to bigamy in modern usage.
Common Confusion
Bigamia should not be confused with the canonical doctrine of bigamia as applied in ecclesiastical law to clergy. In canon law, bigamia carried a specialized meaning beyond the criminal offense: it described the condition of a man who had married twice (successively, not simultaneously) or who married a widow, and on that basis was rendered irregular — that is, disqualified from ordination or the exercise of holy orders. This canonical sense is technically distinct from the criminal or secular sense and appears frequently in medieval ecclesiastical sources. A researcher working in church records or early canon law materials must attend carefully to which sense is operative in context.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of this entry is identification and disambiguation. Bigamia surfaces in Latin-language legal documents — indictments, ecclesiastical court records, treatises of Roman and canon law, and English Year Books — where the vernacular term bigamy would appear in later sources. The term marks a historical register: its presence signals a document rooted in the Latin legal tradition, likely pre-eighteenth century and often earlier.
Two traps await the unwary researcher. First, the canonical irregularity sense (successive marriages or marriage to a widow disqualifying a cleric) is easily misread as the criminal offense sense if the ecclesiastical context is not recognized. Canon law commentators from Gratian through the post-Tridentine period use bigamia extensively in the irregularity sense, and this usage persists in treatises on holy orders well into the modern era. Second, in civil and criminal law, bigamia in historical sources may reflect the Roman law tradition, in which the concept carried somewhat different contours than the common law offense of bigamy — Roman law distinguished between legal and informal unions in ways that affected when a second union constituted bigamia.
For corpus researchers in Law Mind, bigamia most commonly appears as a bridge term between the ecclesiastical and secular law traditions. When tracing bigamy doctrine through the historical corpus, searching both bigamia and bigamy will recover sources that searching either term alone will miss.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary treats bigamia as a simple Latin equivalent, directing readers to the entry for bigamy without independent elaboration. This minimal treatment is representative of the Anglo-American lexicographic tradition, which absorbed the Latin term into the vernacular entry rather than examining it separately. Burrill does note the derivation from bis (twice) and the Greek gamos (marriage), which correctly identifies the term's formal structure.
What Burrill and comparable historical dictionaries do not address is the canonical irregularity doctrine — an omission that reflects their focus on the common law tradition rather than the ecclesiastical. Researchers relying solely on common law dictionaries for this term will miss the canon law dimension entirely. For that layer, civilian and ecclesiastical sources must be consulted directly.
Jurisdictional Note
Bigamia as a live term of legal art is a historical artifact in all modern common law jurisdictions. Modern American and English law uses bigamy or polygamy in statutes and opinions. The Latin form survives only in historical documents, scholarly treatments of canon law, and comparative law writing drawing on the civil law tradition.