# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1858_S373
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

373

Excerpts as Contributions to Pastoral Casuistry.

Whether it is permitted to widows, within the year of mourning,
to marry again?

(From Joh. Gerhard's Loci Theol., Loc. XXVIII, § 198—200.
translated by Conrector G. Schick.)

By civil law a widow who marries within the year of mourning is branded
with infamy (see the Corpus juris), for which they cite two reasons:
first, so that no confusion of offspring may occur, because through such
premature and hasty widow-remarriages (as the emperors call them in the
Corpus juris) occasion can be given that the son of the former husband be
substituted for that of the later one, or that of the later for the
former, and thus the true and rightful heir be defrauded of his paternal
inheritance, while a false and illegitimate heir comes into possession of
the goods that belong to the other by the law of nature and of nations;
second, so that nothing be done contrary to public decency, because the
wife owes her husband love and reverence, and if she therefore hastens at
once to a second marriage, it will appear as though she had at once cast
from her mind the love and memory of the former husband. And it is not
only the wife herself who becomes infamous, who marries within the year of
mourning, but also the husband who knowingly takes her to wife, and the
father who has consented to such a marriage of his son, and the father of
the wife who has consented to it (see the Corpus juris). As for widowers,
they say that these are not compelled by the law to mourn their wives, and
that it is therefore permitted them to marry again at once, because there
is no confusion of offspring to be feared.

As to the first point, the observance of the time of mourning is enjoined
upon widows with full right for the reasons already cited, to which still
others can be added, namely, that even the animals themselves abstain
after conceiving from mating; because too hasty a marriage is seldom free
from the suspicion of adultery or of poisoning; because she cannot please
the later husband who has laid aside so quickly the memory of the former;
because according to the laws and customs of almost all peoples such
untimely marriages are impermissible, as is known from William Lambarde's
Archaionomia, in which he reviews, among others, the law given five
hundred years ago by King Canute of the Danes: "Widows shall wait twice
six months, and only then marry whomever they wish. But if one marries
before a year has passed, she shall be punished as regards her dowry and
stripped of the whole of the property left by her former husband, and all
of this shall go to the nearest relative." The ancient Romans fixed ten
months of mourning for the wife. Plutarch says in his Numa: "The wives
remained widows for ten months from the death of their husbands; if