Definition
Polygamia is the Latin and historical legal term for the condition of being simultaneously married to multiple spouses. In legal usage, it denotes the state of having more than one husband or wife at the same time — what modern law calls polygamy. The term encompasses both polygyny (one husband, multiple wives) and polyandry (one wife, multiple husbands), though the former was the more commonly prosecuted form in Western legal history.
In common law jurisdictions, polygamia was treated as a grave matrimonial offense and, in its more active form (contracting a second marriage while a first subsists), formed the basis of the criminal charge known as bigamy. The distinction between polygamia as a status and bigamy as an act is subtle but legally significant: polygamia describes the condition; bigamy describes the criminal transaction that creates it.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Polygamy" in ordinary English means the practice of having more than one spouse at the same time, used broadly in anthropological, religious, and social contexts without necessarily implying criminality.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not carry a relevant common-language entry for polygamia as a social or legal term. Its entry for the form redirects to a Linnaean botanical classification — a class of plants bearing both hermaphrodite and unisexual flowers — which shares only the Greek root and is otherwise entirely unrelated.
The botanical usage in Webster's 1913 is a significant trap for corpus researchers. A keyword search for "polygamia" in nineteenth-century texts will surface botanical literature alongside legal and canonical sources. The legal term and the Linnaean classification are etymological twins but conceptually unrelated; context must be used to distinguish them.
Common Confusion
Polygamia and bigamy are frequently used interchangeably in older legal sources but are not identical. Polygamia is the broader civil or canonical condition — the state of multiple simultaneous marriages. Bigamy is the specific criminal act of contracting a second marriage while legally bound by a first. A person may be in a state of polygamia without having committed bigamy (for example, where the plurality of marriages was contracted under a legal system that permitted them), and historical ecclesiastical courts often treated polygamia as a matrimonial disability to be adjudicated separately from criminal proceedings.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in Law Mind's historical corpus will encounter polygamia almost exclusively in three contexts: ecclesiastical law treatises, early criminal law commentaries (particularly those touching Coke's Institutes), and comparative or natural law discussions of marriage as a universal institution.
Burrill's citation to 3 Inst. 88 anchors polygamia firmly in the Coke tradition, where it appears as part of the foundational discussion of bigamy as a criminal offense. Researchers tracing the development of Anglo-American marriage law should treat polygamia as the civil-law and canonical antecedent to the statutory bigamy offenses that dominate nineteenth-century American and English criminal codes.
The term largely disappears from American legal writing after the mid-nineteenth century, displaced by the anglicized "polygamy." However, its Latin form persists in ecclesiastical law contexts, canon law scholarship, and comparative law treatments well into the twentieth century. When searching historical sources, both forms must be queried.
A secondary research trap: because polygamia is a recognized Linnaean taxonomic term, natural history periodicals and scientific encyclopedias of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will use the word in an entirely unrelated botanical sense. Corpus searches should be scoped to legal, theological, or social contexts to filter noise.
Jurisdictional variation is historically significant. In continental European legal systems, polygamia was addressed through canon law administered by ecclesiastical courts; in England, the same conduct was treated as a temporal crime following the Bigamy Act of 1603. American jurisdictions inherited the English criminal law framing but added constitutional complexity through the religion clauses, particularly in litigation involving Latter-day Saint practices in the Utah Territory during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Researchers connecting polygamia in early sources to later American polygamy prosecutions should be alert to this doctrinal shift in forum and legal theory.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is brief but precise. He provides the Latin definition — plurium simul virorum uxorumve connubium, the marriage of several husbands or wives at the same time — and correctly identifies both directions of the relationship (multiple husbands or multiple wives), resisting the common error of treating polygamia as exclusively a male-centered institution. His citation to 3 Institutes 88 is the standard anchor point; Coke's treatment there sets the baseline for how common law absorbed and criminalized the condition.
Burrill does not address the ecclesiastical law dimension or the distinction between polygamia as a status and bigamy as an offense. Researchers should supplement Burrill with canonical law sources for the pre-Reformation treatment and with Blackstone's Commentaries for the transition into English common law.
No significant divergence among historical dictionaries on the core definition, though the term's coverage is sparse — most dictionaries of the period simply define it and move on. The absence of elaboration reflects that by the time these dictionaries were compiled, the anglicized "polygamy" had assumed most of the discursive weight.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is essentially uniform in meaning across common law and civil law jurisdictions, though the legal consequences varied sharply. English and American law treated polygamia as criminal bigamy; continental systems addressed it primarily through ecclesiastical annulment proceedings. In the United States, federal anti-polygamy statutes targeting territorial (particularly Utah) practice introduced a constitutional dimension absent from the English authorities.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Marriage; Bigamy