The English legal historian Frederic Maitland famously dismissed the effort and scholarship that went into formulating the medieval church's attitude to kinship with the words: “Behind these intricate rules there is no deep policy, there is no strong religious feeling; they are the idle ingenuities of men who are amusing themselves by inventing a game of skill which is to be played with neatly drawn tables of affinity and doggerel hexameters. The men and women who are the pawns in this game may, if they be rich enough, evade some of the forfeits by obtaining papal dispensations; but then there must be another set of rules marking off the dispensable from the indispensable impediments. When we weigh the merits of the medieval church and have remembered all her good deeds, we are to put into the other scale as a weighty counterpoise the incalculable harm done by a marriage law which was a maze of flighty fancies and misapplied logic” (Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, vol. 2 of The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, ed. S. F. C. Milsom, rev. ed. [1895; Cambridge, 1911], 386).

In this useful book Sam Worby addresses this criticism of the medieval church and traces the development of medieval legal thinking, both ecclesiastic and lay, on kinship and kinship structure. She traces the development of the discussion of kinship in Europe and in England and argues that the common law was primarily concerned with consanguineous relations, while the canon law attempted to add affinal ties to the definition of kinship. Worby compares the rules of Canon law to the rules of common law and finds a surprising overlap between the two legal systems and a remarkable level of learning in the practitioners of both legal systems. Worby's book is logically organized: chapter 1 looks at textbooks dealing with the kinship rules of Canon law, chapter 2 deals with the same issue in common law, chapter 3 discusses which kinship system was dominant, chapter 4 deals with how the rules were applied in practice in the secular and ecclesiastical courts, and chapter 5 analyzes the conceptions of kinship underlying litigation. Like Maitland, Worby has limited her investigation of kinship structure primarily to the literature that either applied in England or emanated in England, and her book provides a useful working transcription of some important, but minor, medieval English treatises on kinship.

In the final two chapters of the book, Worby analyzes surviving English court records in order to demonstrate how the two legal systems were received by the laity in the Middle Ages. In four appendixes, Worby provides transcriptions of some English manuscripts that deal with kinship structures and how to count degrees of consanguinity and affinity. These are not intended to be scholarly editions in the traditional sense of providing a theologically based edition resolving contradictions between different textual traditions but are rather intended to provide examples of the kind of texts dealing with this topic that one might find in medieval England.

This book is at its strongest in its discussion of English legal manuscripts and the concepts of kinship found in the common law tradition. Worby provides a most useful discussion of this and accounts well for the development of kinship laws and the interaction of legal systems in Medieval England. However, one could have wished for a discussion comparing the common law tradition in England to other legal traditions, for example, French, German, Irish, Scottish, or Scandinavian. Such a comparison could have provided important insights into the general European patterns of reception of the Canon law rules of kinship. But, having expressed this wish, it must also be admitted that such a discussion would have added quite a lot to the length of the book. The book could also be strengthened by a more cautious approach to the analysis of the acceptance of the Canon and common law rules concerning kinship among the laity: Worby's analysis is mainly based on published material, often in the shape of analyses of particular courts (e.g., Charles Donahue's important Law, Marriage and Society and Richard Helmholtz's Marriage Litigation in Medieval England). Worby appears mostly to base her conclusions on the insights of modern authors rather than on original research in the archives. The book therefore tends to overestimate the penetration of Canon law into secular society. In addition, like many social historians, Worby fails to take into account that all legal documentation by its very nature must reflect the law that applies to the court in which it was produced. It is certainly the case in all ecclesiastical courts that the very first documents produced by the court were introduced only after plaintiffs had presented their cases orally to the court and that these documents were the result of a condensation of the oral pleading into writing that was the result of consultations between clerics with legal training and the plaintiffs. In addition, there is good evidence that the surviving cases had already passed through a preliminary trial hearing that would have further influenced the narrative that the plaintiffs presented as part of the pleading in the ecclesiastical courts proper.

Despite such reservations, Worby has provided a significant contribution to the scholarship, and her book must be welcomed as an important corrective to Maitland's criticisms of medieval legal scholarship. Medieval legal manuscripts may indeed contain many neatly drawn tables and many doggerel hexameters may have been needed to communicate the intricate medieval rules of kinship, but Worby has done much to show that these tools were a necessary prerequisite for medieval English men and women to make sense of these rules and to apply them to their lives.