This important book looks at medieval marriage through the records of four ecclesiastical courts of the later Middle Ages. It is a comparative social history of marriage practices in England and France/Belgium insofar as they interacted with the Church and its law, in the later Middle Ages. Church court records from York, Ely, Paris, Cambrai and Brussels are the source base – a massive and solid one. Donahue shows that questions turning on prior contracts (alleged prior marriages which called into question the validity of allegedly subsequent marriages) were the main business in medieval England (although the issue could take a number of different legal forms), but that other issues too are prominent in France, notably enforcement, unconsummated future contracts and legal separations.
There have been good studies of marriage litigation in medieval Europe but nothing on this monumental scale. The writing is unostentatiously vivid. The direct style and the human interest of the situations discussed make it an easy book to read. Donahue's own intellectual personality comes through in the right kind of way: he writes as if about people he knows, and indeed he does know them, and reacts to their predicaments, or speculates about their veracity, as one might about contemporaries.
Questions turning on the validity of marriage came under the church courts in this period, and such cases were relatively common because the marriage law of the Church, although clear in principle, left much room for debate in its application to individual cases. Its fundamental principle was that consent alone – the consent of the couple – was enough to make a valid marriage. Further formalities were required but they did not affect the question of whether a marriage actually existed. Donahue explains the law of marriage and also the procedural law of church courts before showing how it was applied. That takes him very close to the details of the lives of individual men and women.
Quantification is one of the book's unusual features in the current historiographical context. For a whole generation most medieval scholars and students have tended to shy away from anything involving statistics and calculations: perhaps a reaction against the over-complexity of much work produced in the 1960s when quantification was the high-status approach. With so many individual marriage cases preserved by later medieval ecclesiastical courts, however, Donahue rightly decided that statistical analysis was the only way to make historical sense of the data. The alternative would be to tell a series of vivid stories that could not serve as the basis of generalisation because one would not know how typical they were. Thus, for example, there are a handful of individual cases from York which, as anecdotal evidence, would appear to bear out the old clichés about medieval marriage: that anyone could get an annulment on grounds of consanguinity, that marriages were mostly arranged, and so on. Only against his statistical background does it become clear that this anecdotal evidence is entirely untypical and unusable as a basis for generalisation. In fact the book is full of vivid stories too, mini-novel after mini-novel, so one has the best of both the world of micro-history and the world of quantification.
Quantification brings out some striking differences between the courts; the variety of church law practice revealed by the book is one of its most important findings. The Paris court granted legal separations much more regularly than the English courts. Its tests for male impotence were much less embarrassing: medical specialists made the decision, rather than ‘honest women’ told to try to arouse the unfortunate man. With the Paris court, men sue to get into a marriage, while at York and Ely he finds the reverse. Present consent cases are few in number by English standards in the Paris court. There we find instead a large category of cases involving betrothal not yet converted into marriage by consummation. The court treated a betrothal as powerful enough to invalidate a future betrothal, and as an impediment (though perhaps not an invalidating impediment) to a future marriage by present consent. Donahue provides explanations for these Paris patterns. A clandestine marriage carried a much greater penalty under the local canon law than in England. That, combined with the willingness to enforce betrothals, may have led litigants' advisers to suggest ‘remembering’ a betrothal rather than full present consent. He gives reason to think however that there really were more cases involving a broken betrothal. He suggests that marriages arranged by a young woman's family with a somewhat older man were a commoner social pattern than in England: urban Parisians do not fit the so-called north-west European marriage pattern and behaved more like urban Italians of the late Middle Ages.
In England some couples got their separation by perjury – lying to convince the court that one of them had previously contracted a clandestine marriage. Though the sterner local ecclesiastical law on illicit if valid clandestine marriage contracts is part of the explanation, Donahue does not think that even mass perjury is enough to account for the data, however, and provides a fascinating interpretation in terms of inheritance law. It involves some personal ideas on the latter, but from Donahue they carry a lot of authority. In his view English law tended to keep the property rights of husband and wife separated: far from absolutely but to a non-trivial extent. In France the trend was towards community of goods. Consequently it was much easier for a couple in England to separate without troubling the church court for a judgement. Donahue's guess is that the actual number of de facto separations in England and France was probably not nearly so great as the statistics might suggest.
An explanation for the broad differences between England and France is suggested, viz. that there was a stronger sense of family and community in France than in England. It is stated cautiously. Donahue does not deny that communitarian family values were important in England. He thinks though that they were not so important as across the channel and that after all the qualifications and caveats have been made there was a stronger tendency towards individualism in England. Rather to my surprise, this seems to bear out the dramatic hypotheses about the ‘rise of English individualism’ developed some decades ago by Alan MacFarlane. The big lacuna in the book of that name was comparative work on cross-channel societies. Donahue's book corrects this imbalance. It was not his main aim but it accounts for a lot: the large numbers of English couples who seem to have contracted marriages without reference to family, the weight attached in France to betrothals behind which parental arrangement can be inferred, the need in France for a formal separation of goods when an informal parting of ways would have done the trick in England.
The section on the diocese of Cambrai (in practice an analysis of two courts not one) tends to focus on contrasts between the court at Cambrai itself and the data from the court of Brussels. Donahue finds much more anxiety at Brussels about the sexual situation: a lot of women entering into relationships in the hope of getting married, having sex and being disappointed. He thinks that the difference in the record may reflect actual social differences. This section on Cambrai could do with a little fine-tuning. It is easy to forget, for instance, whether a given judge was at Cambrai and Brussels. This part of the book makes important points a little to the side of the main thrust of the argument. It directs our attention to the possibility that sexual mores were spinning out of control and further away from the Church's guidelines than was the case elsewhere in Europe.
The original version of this book was much larger, and the author with the publishers decided to publish a slimline version of 672 pages while making the rest of the data available as an e-book. On balance, it would have been better to publish the whole thing, in two volumes if need be. Moving backwards and forwards between hard copy and e-book is not convenient, even if one has also purchased the e-book or is on line with a library that has it.
