'My friend Leo Miller wrote a book called "John Milton Among the Polygamophiles," which touches on this issue.
Miller examines a number of dissertations written for Doctor of Theology degrees in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Protestant candidates for the clergy. He shows that the issue was argued over for more than a century before it was settled. '
Thanks, I will have to check that reference. Do you know of any other good repositories of articles on this topic? I've not really thought about it that much, but a first mental review of the relevant Scripture does suggest that a case could be made for plural marriage (though based on the Bible examples of plural marriages, I would call it highly risky type of relationship, with far greater risk of ending up in the ditch than a single pair husband-wife relathionship).
Probably the best defense of the monogamous position would be built on the notion of marriage as a picture of the relationship between the Lord and Israel, carried over into the NT in Paul's representation of Christian marriage as symbolic of the relationship between Christ and the Church.
Just as Moses got banned from entering the Promised Land for striking the rock a second time, and thus marring the spiritual picture that was being set up by that event, one might argue that Christian polygamous relationships blur the symbolic meaning of Christian marriage. Thus the requirement in the listing of characteristics of pastors and other church officers that they be "the husband of one wife".
None of this, of course, addresses the burning issue of civil control over what counts as "marriage". This is an encroachment of the state that increasingly haunts the modern institution of marriage. But that's a discussion for another time.
To tell the truth, Miller's book is the only one I know on the subject, but he has a pretty large bibliography. There is one excellent book on the theology of marriage in the period, also ironically focusing on Milton's divorce tracts but extending it to Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost. John R. Halkett, "Milton and the Ideal of Matrimony." This too cites plenty of early sources and has a good bibliography.
I just tried to find a copy of a book on medieval marriage that traces the early history of Christian marriage, which I once found very helpful, but I can't seem to put my hands on it at the moment, and I don't recall the author's name. It's in my library somewhere or other.