16th century AD

Synodal and diocesan ritual books also reminded Catholic clergy to avoid all concord or connivance with the laity's older protective magics. Private betrothals, nocturnal weddings, and consummations of unions prior to official church nuptials were roundly condemned by the provincial Catholic council meeting in Reims in 1583, by the 1587 synodal statutes for the diocese of Orleans, and by the new ritual book for the diocese of Saint Brieu redacted in 1606.(72) Cohabitations of any kind by couples prior to their church wedding before a priest were reclassified as sins meriting excommunication in the 1606 edition of the ritual book authorized by the bishop of Evreux and in the Rituels de Paris for 1615 and 1630.(73) Multiple church services joining the same couple in matrimony were prohibited and the essential singularity of the commitment articulated before a priest stressed.

The Catholic church hierarchy battled the lay conviction that priestly benediction of multiple wedding rings also preserved new couples from malevolent magic by stipulating that clergymen officiating at church weddings could bless no more than one ring for each partner.(74) The provincial church council of Tours (1583) and diocesan assemblies at Evreux (1606 and 1621) anathematized all brides and grooms who, as a subterfuge to ward off nouements and other evil charms, conspired to cause their rings to fall on the floor before placing them on their partner's finger.(75) Priests received orders to inform such credulous "prestidigitators" that they profaned holy altars and courted damnation with such futile tricks against the nouement.

Catholic synodal decrees ordered officiating priests to maintain a sharp surveillance over the conduct of all wedding ceremonies down to the smallest details. Clerics had the duty to keep wedding companies at bay, preventing them from ostentatious gift giving while in church, from noisy, salacious outbursts during the ceremony, and from jostling the betrothed or touching them in any way deemed efficacious against malevolent spells. In a clear strike by the church against the potency traditionally ascribed to protective female magics, parish priests were ordered to prohibit brides and their attendants from making any similar prestidigitations or rearrangements in their wedding garb designed to check evil incantations.(76)

As summarized by Thiers, all unorthodox means employed against the nouement "are condemned by the church which prohibits anyone from removing one malefice with another and which excommunicates those who try." This admonition punctuates Thiers' most extensive rebuke of those sinners who seek "to unknot the cord ... by any vain or superstitious practice."(77) In the French west country, magically adept females now ran a progressively greater risk of censure by the Catholic clergy at all levels.

And while Burguiere is certainly correct to emphasize that French Catholicism's long acceptance of the nouement as a diabolical charm capable of causing real harm amounts to an institutional modus vivendi with an older magical realm of folk belief, we should not construe this as some sort of static compromise.(78) By acknowledging the reality of the nouement and the dangers posed by those who sought to do (and undo) it, ecclesiastical authorities maintained a wide battle front against popular heterodoxy, conserving strategic theaters of operation where the salvific powers of priests could be exalted against the allegedly black arts of their traditional competitors in the supernatural realm: malevolent sorcerers and female healers. Reiterated Catholic acknowledgments of the nouement's actual potency offered priests far more status-enhancing opportunities for intervention in the daily lives of parishioners than did the prevalent Protestant conceptualization of the nouement as an "illusion" attributable to the imperfect faith of individual congregants. Indeed, remedies for the nouement comprised one of the most contested fields wherein a male priesthood sought its own legitimation by challenging more insistently the capacity of women to protect kith and kin.