Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages by Georges Duby (review)

258 BOOK REVIEWS of canon law would be for us to assume his challenge: to rigorously examine the structure of the "reform" collections, their reception and their influence; indeed, to continue his attempt to explain how and why the period 1050— 1 1 50 was so different from that which had gone before. Kathleen G. Cushing Cleverdale, New York Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages. By Georges Duby. Translated by Jane Dunnett. (Chicago: University ofChicago Press. 1994. Pp. x, 231. Í37.50.) Georges Duby brings together in this volume fifteen studies, written between 1967 and 1986, which have appeared in scattered books, journals, and occasional publications. To these Duby has added a concluding chapter, originally written in 1980 butpreviously unpublished, in which he surveys "Trends in Historical Research in France, 1950—1980." The papers in this collection fall into three parts. The studies in the first and longest section discuss, as the book's title suggests they should, issues connected with love, marriage, and women's history. Part two treats patterns and changes in family structure. The final section of the book brings together seven shorter essays on a variety ofgeneral topics that range from "The History ofValue Systems" to "Heresies and Societies in Preindustrial Europe between the Eleventh and Eighteenth Centuries." The essays in part one of this book for the most part reproduce arguments that Duby has made in earlier books that are available in English, especially Medieval Marriage (1978) and The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest (1983). The essay "On Courtly Love" and Duby's introduction to the 1976 edition of the Roman de la Rose, however, present provocative readings of courtly literature that will perhaps not be familiar to an Anglophone audience. The three papers on family structures that make up part two of Love and Marriage deal with matters that are central to Duby's scholarly interests, namely, the relationship between the French monarchy and the aristocracy in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The primary evidence that Duby relies upon in these three studies comes largely from French chronicles and other narrative sources, together with a sprinkling of information from charters . The limitations of this evidence base, in turn, significantly restrict the force ofDuby's conclusions about the structure ofmedieval families. Important as France undeniably was in the intellectual, literary, and social life of Europe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it remains to be demonstrated that the marital and family relationships that characterized the French military and landholding elite in those two centuries faithfully reflected conditions elsewhere in Christendom or in social groups other than the high aristocracy. BOOK REVIEWS 259 Even for France, moreover, the abundant evidence that still lies fallow in other types of documents, notably in the poorly explored records of the French ecclesiastical courts, might well present quite a different picture of the family structures that prevailed, not only among the aristocracy, but also among peasants and city dwellers during the thirteenth and following centuries. The third part of Love and Marriage presents a medley of seven studies, mostly brief, on grand themes that range from the history of value systems to Duby's report on trends in French historical research. Duby quite properly compares the studies in this volume to "the pages of a workshop notebook." They constitute a progress report on work that he was engaged in over roughly two decades. Readers may differ widely in their reactions to these fragments from Duby's workbench, but many will find them stimulating and suggestive, although even their author would be reluctant to claim that they present definitive solutions to the problems that they explore. James A. Brundage University ofKansas Stained Glass in England during theMiddleAges By Richard Marks. (Buffalo, New York: University of Toronto Press. 1993· Pp. xxvi, 301; 30 color plates, 200 black and white figures. $85.00.) Earlier in Ulis century a number of general histories of stained glass in England were published; these were followed by numerous detailed treatments of windows in one or more locale, including five titles that have been published in the international Corpus Vitrearum series. A book that draws this material into a lengthy and probing new synthesis is...