To Have and to Hold: Marrying and Its Documentation in Western Christendom, 400–1600 ed. by Philip L. Reynolds, John Witte, Jr. (review)

REVIEWS 285 land and the Netherlands which undergird Spenser’s allegory, he goes on to suggest that Spenser is “challenging allegory” (xi) in such a way that the book is as much about interpretation as it is about justice or Ireland. Stoll closes many of his sections with very helpful pointers to further reading, which often means going to the Spenser Encyclopedia.8 It is nice to see references to a wide range of Spenser scholarship—beginning with C. S. Lewis (xv)—but given how vital the debates are on this book, it would be nice to see a succinct summary of where some of the battle lines have been drawn in these more recent critical conflicts. Stoll makes useful distinctions between equity and justice— though one might quibble with his assumption that the modern reader would necessarily consider inherited social class to be an “outmoded form of justice” (xiii). In Stoll’s edition, the explanatory notes are more problematic than the introduction; to begin with, they are too sparse. For example, when Clarinda says to Artegall, “I rew that thus thy better dayes are drowned / In sad despaire, and all thy senses swowned / In stupid sorow, sith thy juster merit / Might else have with felicitie bene crowned:” (5.5.36.4–7), a note explaining that “stupid” should be understood as “stupified” is essential, but not there. And although Spenser is fond of using pronouns which are not clearly and immediately tied to referents, the reader needs more help in sorting out the male pronouns, for example, in 5.3.34. Occasionally the notes are actually wrong; 5.5.5.3 reads “Soone after eke came she, with fell intent,”; Stoll explains “eke” as “and,” whereas it clearly means “also.” Stoll explains “fact” (5.9.43.1) as “guilt”; in fact, it means “deed.” And Stoll glosses “pelf” (5.11.63.6) as “riches”; here it importantly denotes riches gained through malefaction. Spenser’s masterpiece deserves individual, current modern paperback editions which are informed by the revolutions in editorial theory of the past generation. And in places, this collection offers an ideal alternative to the excerpts of The Faerie Queene which appear in anthologies and the larger editions of Hamilton and Roche. Those volumes which meet this standard will be of great use in the classroom, and the collection as a whole will hopefully be the forerunner to a more consistently conceived and executed series of paperback editions of this remarkably current work. MICHAEL SAENGER, English, Southwestern University To Have and to Hold: Marrying and Its Documentation in Western Christendom , 400–1600, ed. Philip L. Reynolds and John Witte, Jr. (New York: Cambridge University Press 2007) xv + 519 pp. This anthology is one of a series of new volumes resulting from the project “Sex, Marriage, and Family & the Religions of the Book,” undertaken by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. The contributors to this volume analyze the function of documentation in the process of marrying in Western Christendom, and what the surviving documents say about pre-modern marriage and how people understood it. The period between 400 and 1600 was selected because the theological syntheses of St. Augustine and 8 A. C. Hamilton, et al., The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto 1997). REVIEWS 286 others post-Nicene Church Fathers, and the legal syntheses of the Roman jurists working from the reign of Constantine through Justinian, formed the foundations for Western marriage for more than a millennium. Based on marital documents that have survived and represent a rich source of information about the marital norms and customs in the West, the contributors bring us closer to the actual practice of marrying than the normative literature of theology and canon law. They record moments in the lives of real persons, allowing the reader to see how the antique marriage paradigm was adapted in various eras and areas of Western Christian Europe, in accordance with widely different customs, languages, liturgies, and property usages. They show that, despite differences in time and space, the basic norms and forms of marriage inherited in the West from the fifth and sixth centuries were not seriously challenged until the eighteenth - and nineteenth-century...