Marriage, Family, and Law in Medieval Europe: Collected Studies (review)

Marriage, Family, and Law in Medieval Europe: Collected Studies. By Michael M. Sheehan, C.S.B. Edited by James K. Farge, C.S.B. (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. 1996. Pp. xxxi, 330. $45.00 clothbound; $21.95 paperback.)

Michael Sheehan was killed in a tragic bicycling accident at the age of sixty-seven. He left a major monograph, a revision of his doctoral dissertation on The Will in Medieval England: From the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to the End of the Thirteenth Century,¹ and a widely scattered collection of papers. The papers are all significant, and some of them are path-breaking. His memory is well served by the collection of sixteen reprinted here.

Sheehan's work focused on marriage and the family in the Middle Ages, particularly as it was reflected in English legal practice. His first major paper was an outgrowth of his study of testaments: "The Influence of Canon Law on the Property Right of Married Women in England."² In it he showed that the dismal view that the medieval common law held of the capacity of married women to deal with property must be balanced against the more optimistic view taken by the canon law. There is also evidence that at times actual practice seems to have come closer to the canon-law than to the common-law view.

Sheehan's next major paper was dramatic not only in its conclusions but also in its use of sources. "The Formation and Stability of Marriage in Fourteenth Century England: Evidence of an Ely Register"³ is the first study to make use of English church court records to address the question to what extent and in what way the canon law was applied to actual medieval marriages. Its major conclusions--that contrary to a priori expectations litigation about prohibited degrees was not a major source of the marriage business of the late medieval church courts and that the attitudes toward marriage found in the register are "astonishingly individualistic"⁴--have stood the test of time. Sheehan deepened and reconfirmed these conclusions in a series of papers written over the last twenty years of his life.⁵

The story that Sheehan told is a complicated one. He was impatient--though he was always gentle about it--with reductionist theories.⁶ Over the course of centuries, the western Church developed distinctive views about marriage and the family, views informed both by inherited ideas and by the societies of which she formed a part. These views were expressed in a wide range of sources: formal canon law, confessors' manuals, sermons, the liturgy. They also stood, at times, in tension with the needs and desires of lay society. Where some authors have seen the repression of sexuality, Sheehan saw more its channeling into legitimate marriage, and the development of an alternative to sexual expression in a life of celibacy. Where some authors have seen two irreconcilable models of marriage, an ecclesiastical and a lay one, Sheehan saw more a blending of lay and ecclesiastical ideals, with tension at the margins, in the Church's insistence, for example, that legitimate marriage be available to the poor and unfree.

Sheehan's work inspired others. Few, however, have been able to match Sheehan's careful command of the sources and his mastery of different techniques for analyzing them, ranging from statistical tabulation to seemingly serendipitous connections with ideas found in literary, pastoral, and domestic sources. Each time we return to his work we find new material and new insights. The work has not been superseded; it is not out-of-date. It deserved publication as a corpus.

Charles Donahue, Jr.
Harvard Law School

Notes

1. Studies and Texts, 6 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1963).

2. Marriage, Family, pp. 16-30.

3. Ibid., pp. 38-76.

4. Ibid., p. 76.

5. E.g., "Choice of Marriage Partner in the Middle Ages," ibid., pp. 87...