Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England (review)

This is a very fine book. It is certainly the most important work on courtship and matchmaking in early modern England to have been published since Martin Ingram’s Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987). Indeed, in many respects it is the most illuminating study of these issues known to me.

At first glance, one might expect a study of the deposition books of the consistory court of the diocese of Canterbury and the marriage-related provisions of wills from five sample parishes to be essentially a work of consolidation. Such material is familiar enough. If O’Hara had been content to pursue in Kentish sources the same issues that have already been explored for other dioceses, that alone would have been welcome. But she does much more. She offers both an extension and a genuine rethinking of the subject. She is dissatisfied with the way in which approaches to the history of marriage in early modern England have been shaped by the critical response to Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London, 1977).¹ In her view the resultant interpretative preoccupation with familial control versus individualism in partner choice is “fundamentally misconceived” (237). She wants to start again by attempting a holistic approach to the processes of courtship which explores “the full range of constraints and considerations that might affect even the humblest” (3) and by focusing sharply upon the sixteenth century—the first period for which these matters can be studied in sufficient depth and detail.

She succeeds admirably. This is a short book, but it addresses aspects of the making of marriage never before explored so closely or with such imaginative insight. Only the first chapter, on the role of family, kin and community in the structuring of courtship, goes over really familiar ground and even here she persuasively reformulates the discussion. While never denying the existence of individual choice or the realities of romantic and sexual attraction, she insists upon exploring fully “the bounds within which they existed” (32). Courtship was “experienced on both a personal and collective level” (40). Individual initiatives were subject to the constraints of an “increasingly public series of examinations and meetings,” (31) a set of ritual stages which provided a means of “facilitating harmony and the mutual protection of interests” amongst family, kin and community.

Thereafter, chapter after chapter extends the discussion into new areas, exploring original questions and presenting illuminating findings and stimulating arguments, which constitute cumulatively a resetting of the agenda. If some of the issues she addresses have been touched upon before, no one has previously focused upon them so sharply, explored them in such detail or with such insight, or brought out their significance so fully and clearly. Her analysis of the use of gifts and tokens as “a language for conducting and defining relationships” (57) is wholly original. Her chapter on the use of intermediaries illuminates the extent to which courtship was a “mediated and delegated joint effort”(118). The chapter on geographical ‘courtship horizons’ is novel in its analysis and scope and intriguing in its demonstration of the enlargement of the areas of contact in the course of the sixteenth century. Above all, perhaps, the chapters on notions of the appropriate age for marriage and on dowries are extremely impressive pieces of research and analysis. They present fresh and potentially very significant perspectives on the dynamics of nuptiality in the sixteenth century, raising the possibility of rising age thresholds for marriage and demonstrating a massive inflation in dowries among the common people and the “pervasiveness of money matters”(215) in courtship negotiations.

In all these ways O’Hara elaborates her central theme of reasserting the significance of the various constraints which shaped marital decision-making. And she does it persuasively because of the consistently high level of her approach to the problems she tackles. She has...