Annulment Suits and the épreuve du congrès at the Officialité de Paris in the Early Seventeenth Century: Judicial Theory and Legal Practice

Abstract

This essay examines the controversial usage of a procedure known as the épreuve du congrès to adjudicate suits by women seeking to annul their marriages in French Church courts (officialités) on the grounds of their husbands’ impotence. Drawing on an analysis of thirty-two cases reconstituted from the Officialité de Paris in the early seventeenth century, this article assesses the extent to which jurists’ and medical experts’ defenses and critiques of the congrès as a method of proof corresponded to the ways it was used in practice.