Dissolving Royal Marriages: A Documentary History, 860–1600 by D. L. d’Avray (review)

Students of medieval marriage have struggled with the difficult Latin found in papal correspondence and with the proper contextualization and interpretation of legal documents for many years. By presenting sensitive and elegant English translations of important documents in twenty Western European royal divorce cases, beginning with the ninth-century divorce between Lothar and Theutberga and ending with the sixteenth-century divorce of Henri IV of France and Marguerite of Valois, David d’Avray shows how a collection of translated sources can be made accessible to a broad modern audience. The geographical coverage of his collection is impressive: from Spain in the south to Scotland and Denmark in the north. The intended audience is wide, ranging from those beginning to learn about medieval marriage to seasoned researchers in the field.

In this selection, d’Avray makes the important point that one cannot comprehend the record of a medieval royal marriage dispute without understanding that papal authority rested on the need for individual popes to be seen as both stern upholders of the common received understanding of the law and merciful arbiters between estranged spouses. Eloquently illustrating this point, d’Avray prefaces each of his twenty cases with an overview of the legal issues raised, the persons involved in pursuing the case, and the wider political implications of the disputes when appropriate. Each historical introduction is followed by a discussion of the historiography and the most important studies of each case. D’Avray’s incisive discussions not only give a strong indication of the quality of the scholarship that has gone before but also engage with significant questions raised by previous historians and, in many cases, propose new ways of understanding the application of medieval marriage law.

By their very nature, the texts provided are not always for the faint-hearted, and the English translations can be challenging. To describe his translation practice, d’Avray takes Edward Ullendorff’s maxim “as near to the original as possible and as far from it as necessary” as his motto, but adds that he does “not count as ‘bad English’ very long and complex syntactical structures … which mirror the Latin” (p. 10). Though one may quibble with this approach, which does produce some very minor discrepancies between the Latin text and its translation, it is a fruitful approach. The linguistic diversity of the sources is reflected by the translations and allows even relative newcomers a taste of their variety, complexity, and rhetorical impact. A case in point is Nicolas I’s 867 letter to King Lothar. Although it is long, complex, and filled with difficult English sentences, the result of d’Avray’s conscious decision is exhilarating. A modern reader cannot help but be impressed by Nicolas I’s linguistic tour de force, which in its choice of adjectives and use of biblical quotations conveys the full force of Nicolas’s fury and learning.

D’Avray’s selection of texts encompasses a diversity of genres: annals and chronicles, papal and episcopal letters, procedural documents, recorded witness accounts, and entire notarized transcriptions of case files. In many instances it would have been valuable to see more extensive selections, but d’Avray has chosen wisely among the documents to provide a compilation that does not stray from its main purpose: to illustrate that individual popes responded to individual circumstances in individual marriage cases and that papal decisions were the outcome of a complex dynamic among the papacy, individual kings and their spouses, and representatives of the European polity in general. By maintaining his focus, d’Avray shows how the need for consensus concerning the papacy’s power to mediate royal marriage disputes shaped papal decisions during the medieval period in subtle and sometimes surprising ways.

With this collection of sources, d’Arvray has made it easy for students of all levels of sophistication to examine his sources and come to their own conclusions about these twenty cases...