Definition
A second marriage contracted after the death of a former spouse. Deuterogamy describes the lawful condition of a surviving widow or widower who remarries, as distinguished from bigamy (concurrent marriage to two living spouses) or digamy (a term sometimes used interchangeably). The term carries no legal disability in modern law; it is a descriptive classification rather than a legal status with operative consequences.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A second marriage after the death of the first husband or wife; distinguished from bigamy as defined in the old canon law.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A second marriage after the death of the first husband or wife, in distinction from bigamy as defined in the old canon law.
The gap here is not between common and legal meaning — both track closely — but between the term's historical legal significance and its present irrelevance. In canon law and early English ecclesiastical practice, deuterogamy carried real stigma and in some periods incurred ecclesiastical penalties. Modern secular law attaches no meaning to the term at all. A researcher encountering the word in a historical source should read it against its canonical backdrop, not through a modern legal lens.
Common Confusion
Deuterogamy is most commonly confused with bigamy and, to a lesser extent, digamy. The distinctions matter in historical sources:
Bigamy (canonical sense): In early canon law, bigamy referred not only to concurrent marriages but also to any second marriage, including sequential marriages after a spouse's death. A man who had married twice — even lawfully — could be disqualified from holy orders under this canonical usage. This older meaning is functionally obsolete in secular law but appears throughout ecclesiastical legal texts.
Bigamy (modern legal sense): Marriage to a second person while a prior spouse is still living. This is the criminal offense. Deuterogamy involves no living prior spouse and is entirely lawful.
Digamy: Often used as a synonym for deuterogamy. Some sources treat digamy as the broader category (any second marriage) and deuterogamy as the specific subcategory (second marriage after spousal death), but the terms are not consistently distinguished across dictionaries or jurisdictions.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter deuterogamy almost exclusively in three contexts: ecclesiastical law materials, 19th-century domestic relations treatises, and legal dictionaries of that era. Its practical legal significance peaked in the period when canon law governed marriage in England and when the Church imposed disabilities — including bar from holy orders — on men who had married more than once, even sequentially and lawfully.
Key navigational intelligence:
The term appears in legal dictionaries chiefly as a definitional artifact. Black's 1st and 2nd editions define it identically and without elaboration, suggesting editors included it for completeness rather than because it carried active legal weight at the time of publication.
Bouvier's definition is slightly broader — "after the death of a former husband or wife" — implicitly covering the remarriage of widows as well as widowers, a nuance that mattered in contexts where a widow's legal status (dower rights, property holding) was affected by remarriage.
When researching historical marriage law, disability-on-remarriage clauses in wills or trusts (restraints on remarriage), or ecclesiastical court records, the term may surface as a classificatory label. Its presence signals that the author is working within a canon law or ecclesiastical law framework.
Do not import the term into modern statutory research. No contemporary U.S. or English statute uses deuterogamy as a operative term.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries agree on the core meaning but differ subtly in framing. Black's (both editions) defines it from the perspective of the husband remarrying after the death of a wife — a gendered framing consistent with the period's default legal subject. Bouvier's neutralizes the definition to cover either spouse's remarriage, which is the more accurate and complete formulation.
None of the three source dictionaries explains why the term warranted inclusion or provides the canonical law context that gives the word its historical significance. Webster's 1913 is actually more informative on this point than any of the legal dictionaries: it flags the canon law distinction from bigamy explicitly and cites Goldsmith, suggesting the term had some literary as well as legal circulation.
The historical dictionaries do not address the disability question — that is, the ecclesiastical consequences of deuterogamy — leaving a gap that researchers working in pre-Reformation English church law or comparative canon law will need to fill from other sources.
Jurisdictional Note
Deuterogamy has no operative meaning in modern American, English, or Commonwealth statutory law. Its significance is exclusively historical and ecclesiastical. Researchers working in civil law jurisdictions or in comparative religious law may find cognate terms and concepts with more continued vitality.