The formidable Madame Barbe-Nicole (Veuve) Clicquot, who gazes unflinchingly at the reader from the cover of Beatrice Moring and Richard Wall's volume, delivers a preview of the argument to be found inside. When her husband died, their family enterprise was a reasonably successful business undertaking; after sixty years at the helm, her champagne company was shipping nearly eight times the number of bottles yearly across all of Europe, east and west, and had created an international brand worth millions. Today, her eponymous brand denotes quality and luxury on the global marketplace.

The overall aim of this volume is to provide a broad accounting of the lives of widows in Europe, with a focus on their economic experiences, from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. Geographically the authors move from England across western Europe to encompass Scandinavia and parts of eastern Europe. However, while the evidence spans some four hundred years, most of the focus settles on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the areas most thoroughly covered are England and the Nordic countries. The broad scope of the book does nonetheless allow the authors to draw attention to experiences common to widows in a variety of locations, while also providing specific detail about women in particular times and spaces.

Within this framework, the book forwards several arguments about widows; arguments that Veuve Cliquot's life trajectory illustrates. First, it shows quite clearly that widows were important economic actors. The authors not only demonstrate that widows worked to support themselves and their families, they also show that many were successful entrepreneurs and businesswomen. The examination of laws governing female property holding and inheritance provide a basis for understanding what economic resources women could expect to have after their husbands died. Marriage contracts and other similar agreements assured wives that they could claim resources to support themselves when they lost a spouse. The widows considered generally made good use of the property they inherited or could use until their deaths. Not infrequently, as Moring and Wall show, widows took inherited assets and built stronger and more profitable enterprises than their husbands had left. In keeping with the overall upbeat perspective of the volume, this insight emphasises widows’ independence, the options they had, and the multiple ways they exercised their agency.

Connected to the finding that widows had access to economic resources and possibilities is the argument that widows were not particularly more prone to poverty than other working people. While Moring and Wall's evidence shows that many widows did need assistance, they were by no means entirely dependent on largesse for their existence. First the authors demonstrate that poor relief was simply not sufficient to support a widow, especially if she still had dependants to care for. Even when poor relief was generous, widows still needed to work or have additional resources to survive. Charity was not envisioned as a sole source of subsistence. And, in fact, part of poor relief was often delivered in the form of materials widows could use to earn a living, such as use of land or raw materials for spinning or weaving. One point the authors do not explicitly consider as they work out the relationship between widows and poor relief is the social attitudes that determined who was deemed eligible to make a claim for support and who was not. Widows have traditionally been considered some of the most worthy claimants of relief given their vulnerable position and it would be fruitful to consider whether these women were more frequent recipients of support because their requests were seen as legitimate and were therefore more readily granted. Nonetheless, the accounting of how poor relief worked for widows in this comparative framework provides a strong foundation for supporting the idea that widows did indeed garner support from their communities.

A third argument that emerges in this volume concerns the ‘European marriage pattern’, which asserts that northern Europe saw the development of nuclear families as the dominant form of household social organisation. Moring and Wall show that this conceptualisation of families does not line up with the many households that contained widows living with children and other family members. In line with the economic approach taken here, the authors emphasise the need to pool resources after the death of a husband and father. For example, some marriage contracts and other similar agreements envisioned children and widowed spouses working together, and sharing resources, to survive. However, here too there may be cultural reasons for families to stay together after the death of the family patriarch. Consequently, while Moring and Wall discuss such contracts as part of the economic factors affecting widows’ experiences, a further consideration of the emotional pulls that might draw together a mourning family would strengthen this argument. Likewise, the widow's know-how would be a valuable resource to help a family business run successfully.

In addition to the contribution this volume makes in understanding the economic and familial landscape widows faced, it also provides a great deal of information in the form of appendices and tables. The evidence enumerated here includes tabulated data from tax records, probate inventories and parish records. These additions to the text form a useful resource both for assessing the arguments made in this insightful contribution to the field and for undertaking future research. Overall, this book presents a valuable survey of the experiences of widows across Europe from 1600 onwards. The scope of the evidence and the arguments provide readers with an expansive understanding of the subject that helps to illuminate and challenge stereotypes of widows.