Mia Korpiola's study of marriage law in medieval and Reformation Sweden focuses on the ways in which ecclesiastical doctrines from continental Europe interacted with indigenous traditions. The book will be illuminating for any scholar interested in the legal history of marriage, and not only for specialists in Scandinavia. Because of the relatively late arrival of Catholic canon law in Sweden, such developments occurred more rapidly and evidently here than elsewhere. Moreover, secular nuptial practices that remained unwritten on the Continent were codified in Swedish provincial laws from the late thirteenth through early fifteenth centuries, probably in reaction to the invasion of church law (20). Early medieval European customs that remain the object of inference and conjecture, such as bedding and the morning gift, appear here in the full light of documented history. Much the same might be said of Iceland, and Korpiola's work complements Agnes Arnórsdóttir's, which she cites.

Korpiola's chief documentary evidence is the Swedish provincial laws. She also cites King Magnus Eriksson's Law of the Realm and his Town Law (mid-fourteenth century), which incorporated provincial laws (21). In the later period, Korpiola includes evidence of actual practice. No records of church court proceedings have survived (8).

Marrying in Sweden was not an event but a process, with clearly defined steps (3, 19). Scholars have observed how this trait endured everywhere in Europe, despite an ecclesiastical doctrine (involving the twelfth-century distinction between future-tense and present-tense betrothals) that should have made marrying an all-or-nothing event. The trait was especially resilient in Sweden. The traditional process began with the betrothal, at which the bride was rather an object of the agreement than a party to it (86, 160). There were financial settlements prior to the wedding (69–74), and the process culminated in the wedding itself, at which the bride was given away by her marriage guardian, normally her closest male relative (23–35). After the wedding feast came the bedding (60–66). Finally, the bride received her morning gift, usually on the morning after the wedding night, but regardless of whether the marriage had been consummated (78–85).

By insisting that spousal consent, including the consent of the bride, was both necessary and sufficient, the church was at odds both with the traditional betrothal and with the rights of the marriage guardian. Korpiola notes that some scholars have interpreted this consensualism as a means by which clerics curtailed the power of kin over marriage (118), but she prefers to regard it as part of the trend toward individualism that Colin Morris has postulated (118–19, 154). She argues that marriage by spousal consent alone must have been “an alien ‘legal transplant’ in a formal and ritualistic legal culture like medieval Sweden” (149). Korpiola ingeniously traces the influence of consensualism in an incomplete, partly terminological shift from the traditional betrothal contract (fästa) to the newfangled trothplight (trolofnader, 191–99).

Whereas Duby famously posited a “battle” between ecclesiastical and aristocratic “models” of marriage in twelfth-century France, Korpiola finds something more like mutual adjustment and compromise in Sweden (a paradigm that one might usefully apply even to France and England). Thus, provincial laws included the solemnization of marriage by priests, but they put it in the chapter on church law, and not in the chapters on marriage (204). Again, the provincial laws could not prevent persons from marrying without the marriage guardian's consent, but they penalized them instead (160). The secular and ecclesiastical definitions of legitimacy remained partly distinct throughout the Middle Ages (260). But bishops sometimes dissolved betrothals (184, 188), and, although betrothal was still an essentially secular agreement in the late Middle Ages, both future-tense and present-tense betrothals had come under clerical supervision by the late fifteenth century (259).

Consent was again central to developments after the Reformation. The Lutheran clergy everywhere insisted that marriage required parental consent. Paradoxically, Swedish children were required to obey their parents in marrying, but parents were not allowed to coerce them (384). Korpiola suggests that, as in the Reformed Church of Scotland, pastors used the font as their chief means of discipline. They stigmatized women who brought illegitimate children to baptism, including the offspring of unions made by spousal consent alone (385).

This is a rewarding book. I wonder if the second chapter, a summary of marriage law in medieval canonical and theological sources, is too long. Unlike the rest of the book, it is based largely on secondary literature, and I noticed a few inaccuracies here regarding the theological sources, although they do not affect the argument of the book. But the rest is first-class and highly original. Although she depends chiefly on law texts, Korpiola writes in an engaging way with plenty of narrative color, encouraging the reader to imagine what actually happened.