In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Law, Marriage, and Society in the Later Middle Ages: Arguments about Marriage in Five Courts
  • Kirsi Salonen
Donahue, Charles Jr. — Law, Marriage, and Society in the Later Middle Ages: Arguments about Marriage in Five Courts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 672.

Charles Donahue Jr.'s book Law Marriage, and Society in the Later Middle Ages is, in the author's own words, "a study of marriage litigation . . . in the archiepiscopal court of York and the Episcopal courts of Ely, Paris, Cambrai, and Brussels." But the book goes far beyond the Harvard professor of law's modest description of his lifelong research. Starting in the 1960s when he became interested in the marital legislation of Pope Alexander III (1159-1181), Donahue has built a brilliant career in studying and explaining mediaeval society through marriage laws. The present book summarizes the results of his research in the field.

The study begins with a chapter describing the book's main themes: the laws defining marriage in the Middle Ages, the problematical points (and possible loopholes) in ecclesiastical marriage legislation, and the kinds of cases brought before the ecclesiastical courts. The author thus ties the institution of marriage into a broader concept of networking in the surrounding society. The second chapter is introductory as well, in the sense that it gives — through four well-documented English litigation cases — an idea of the litigants and their strategies before the courts.

In the following seven chapters (chap. 3-9), Donahue carefully presents all the information he has gathered from court records during decades of research. He [End Page 477] compares cases to find similarities and dissimilarities between the different territories that are his focus. He handles the information from each court separately, starting with York (chap. 3-5), then Ely (chap. 6), Paris (chap. 7), and finally Cambrai and Brussels (chap. 8-9). He begins each section with a statistical analysis that he compares with the previous findings, then discusses the material in further detail. This is not an easy task, since the content and form of the surviving source corpuses from the five courts are so different from each other. Donahue succeeds, however, in his task of taming the ecclesiastical records sufficiently to be able to juxtapose them in an intelligible comparison.

In chapters 10 and 11, the author discusses two additional problematic areas of marriage litigation, namely divorce/separation and incest. Here, too, he succeeds in finding similarities and differences in the patterns he explores, this time almost without statistic analysis.

Donahue concludes the book with an Epilogue (chap. 12), which demonstrates how the variety of source material points towards two different social models: English and Franco-Belgian. He argues that these different models formed as a result of territorial variances in local legislation in matters such as marriage, property, and inheritance. He also considers rural-urban variations, as well as the court practices (office cases versus instance cases) to be causes of regional differences. At the end of this chapter, Donahue contextualizes his discoveries by comparing them with the results of the Spanish and German researchers — and, especially, very recent Italian scholarship — and concludes that different marital patterns can be detected in various parts of Christendom, but that there is still very much work to be done before we can fully explain them. In the Epilogue he returns to his scholarly roots and absolves Pope Alexander III from having caused all this trouble through his marital legislation.

Donahue demonstrates with this study how one person can master a vast amount of material from five different ecclesiastical courts (York, Ely, Paris, Cambrai, and Brussels) in three different countries (England, Belgium, and France), ranging from 1300 to 1500. He has made the archival material speak through both statistics and lively case studies. The inclusion of statistics in numerous tables enables the reader to see varying patterns in local courts and to place the results in the context of late mediaeval history. The case studies illustrate a qualitative, human point of view, which in too many scholarly books is overshadowed by statistics and patterns. Donahue's examples are not just isolated case studies, but highlight the litigants' (futile or desperate) motives and their...

pdf

Share