Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany by Joel F. Harrington (review)

BOOK REVIEWS99 denigration of Baer does him Uttle credit. Roth accuses Baer of "deUberately" overlooking or distorting important documents (pp. 319, 396, n. 150). Roth himself appears,however, to have deUberately distorted a statement by Baer. He states (p. 238) that Baer "invented [a] fiction" about the 1480's. WhUe Baer, in hisHistory (p. 299),by a sUp,does change a grave threat ofcivU war in Córdoba into "open warfare," if one consults the original document (Die Juden, II, 468-472), one finds that it refers to 1464, a time when armed conflict between "old" Christians and conversos was anything but "fictional." Other instances of distortion could be cited. On page 12 (n. 20) and page 259 (n. l6l) Roth is incorrect in accusing Baer of misinterpreting the texts he cites. On these and other occasions the "confusion" to which Roth refers is not in Baer's mind but in his own. J. N. HUXGARTH Pontifical Institute ofMediaeval Studies Early Modern European Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany. By Joel F. Harrington . (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1995. Pp. xv, 315. $49.95.) Joel Harrington's book on the sixteenth-century reUgious reformations' impact on the institution and practice of marriage in the German-speaking world rests on two assumptions: the alteration of human behavior is an inherently difficult undertaking, in which only long-term successes, ifany, are to be expected; and social changes recommended by reform agendas are to be measured only by practices, where they intersect with the inertia of custom. These principles lead him to rule out the possibiUty of a revolutionary change, but not change altogether , in assertions about marriage Ui sixteenth-century Germany. Harrington develops a two-pronged comparative research strategy, diachronic and universal for discourse, synchronic and local for practice. On the first line, he marshals a wide spectrum of academic treatises, pamphlets, and printed ordinances to compare the ideas of twelfth-century reformers on marriage with those of later reformers, both CathoUc and Protestant. He finds that later reforms were a mature stage of a much longer transformation of marriage from an exchange of objects—bride-price for bride—into a holy, indissoluble union of subjects, wUe and husband. On the second line, Harrington assembles sources on the regulation of marriage in the three German states—a major territorial state (the Rhine Palatinate ), a city-state (Speyer), and a prince-bishopric (Speyer)—which lay in the same region and were respectively of the Reformed, Lutheran, and CathoUc confessions. The sources, though more fragmentary than those for Württem- 100BOOK REVIEWS berg, Nuremberg, orWürzburg, are nonetheless dense enough to support his argument for a basic uniformity in the regulation of marriage across confessional boundaries. Bringing the two lines together, Harrington finds that the programs of the reformers , especiaUy the Protestant ones, far outran the means of contemporary states and state-churches to put them into practice. "Sixteenth-century marriage reform," he summarizes, "was typified by commonly high reUgious standards , with commonly inadequate means of implementation" (p. 277). This inteUigently conceived and weU executed book cuts a middle way between Steven Ozment's "Protestant Whig approach" (p. 1 1) and the disinclination ofmodernists, such as Lawrence Stone, to recognize any significant change in early modern attitudes toward marriage. Harrington's battle against their equaUy anachronistic expectations succeeds because of his double envelopment of marriage along a diachronic, universal axis of discourse and a synchronic , local one of praxis. His approach fits very weU with both the approach to Protestant doctrine as the "harvest of medieval theology" (Heiko A. Oberman ) and the approach to premodern Germany in terms of local and territorial history (Otto Brunner, Karl Siegfried Bader). It also aUows him to revise very significantly Adhémar Esmein's durable but surely false thesis about the Protestant reformation's secularization of marriage. These are major achievements, and this is a very good book. Thomas A. Brady,Jr. University ofCalifornia, Berkeley The Books of Assumption of the Thirds of Benefices: Scottish Ecclesiastical Rentals at the Reformation. Edited by James Kirk. [Records of Social and Economic History, New Series 21.] (PubUshed for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, New York. 1995. Pp. lxxxviii...