The large literature on medieval marriage, whether or not written by ecclesiastical or legal historians, has tended to focus on what we would call theological and/or legal sources. Van Houts does not ignore such sources, but she ranges widely, particularly into narrative (chronicles, saints’ Lives) and more strictly literary sources (lyric poetry, romances). Her coverage is impressive, as is her command of the secondary literature.

The problem with the theological and legal sources, as is well known, is that these sources are normative. The authors are telling us what ought to happen, not necessarily what did happen. Even where we have records of litigated cases (rare in van Houts's period; more in the later Middle Ages), these records tell us about a small percentage of marriages that did not work. They have to be used very carefully if one is seeking to find out about marriage generally. The same, however, can also be said about narrative and literary sources. The authors and audiences of these works were interested in the unusual, not the mundane. There is also no a priori reason to believe that the mundane was the same across four hundred years, from Iceland to Sicily, in societies in all of which class distinctions were quite sharp and separation by gender quite strong.

Van Houts is well aware of the problems of her sources and the challenge that temporal, geographical and social diversity poses to any attempt to sum up in three hundred pages the experience of married life in her period. She rises to the challenge splendidly. There are those, including the present reviewer, who will disagree with pieces of it. The inveterately sceptical or those who insist on quantitative support will argue that there is simply not enough evidence to draw any general conclusions. If we are going draw general conclusions, however, it is hard to escape the ones in this book: something happened in the second half of the twelfth century that led to a change, not only in ecclesiastical circles but in lay ones as well, that made society, perhaps at all levels, more open to monogamous, affective marriage and to greater agency for women in their marital careers. That this was the result of a collaboration between women, initially elite women, and clergy who were for the most part not prelates is necessarily somewhat speculative, but certainly plausible. Whether the impetus for the change came originally from laypeople and moved to the clergy, as van Houts is inclined to think, or whether it occurred more simultaneously is perhaps unknowable, granted the paucity of evidence for the eleventh century.

The book is organised into eight substantive chapters: ‘Making of marriage’ (pp. 29–61); ‘Wedding celebrations’ (pp. 63–86); ‘Sexuality and love’ (pp. 87–122); ‘Authority and collaboration’ (within the marital unit) (pp. 123–40); ‘End of marriage and remarriage’ (pp. 141–68); (6) ‘Clerical marriages’ (pp. 170–202); ‘Living with one or more partners’ (polygyny) (pp. 203–28); and ‘Single life’ (both in religious communities and in the secular world) (pp. 229–54). Many of the chapters proceed systematically from evidence concerning the landed elite (from which the bulk of the evidence for this period comes), to evidence concerning urban dwellers (particularly the better-off), to evidence concerning peasants (about whom we know the least). Where possible, evidence derived from secondary sources about Jews and Muslims in Europe is offered by way of comparison and contrast.

Each of the chapters, including the last three, build up to the final conclusions. They are all short and so cannot be comprehensive. This is particularly true of the last three, all of which have been subject to book-length treatments elsewhere, in some cases more than one. The focus of the chapter on clerical marriages is on the articulated objections of some of the married higher clergy to giving up their wives, that on polygyny to its decline among the elite, and that on single life to the increasing reluctance of at least male religious houses to accept child oblates.

Each step in the argument deserves a full treatment; space allows only a few remarks: This reviewer is less convinced than is van Houts (p. 51, cf. pp. 7–8) that the decisions of Alexander iii were critical in removing any canonical requirement of parental consent for children to marry. There are, admittedly, ambiguities on the topic in the Vulgate edition of Gratian, but, in marked contrast to the civilian jurists, none of the decretists between Gratian and Alexander seems to have thought that parental consent was a canonical requirement. Alexander simply assumes the non-existence of such a requirement.

What Alexander did do, at least at the end of his pontificate, was resoundingly confirm that the absence of solemnity or ceremony did not invalidate a marriage. This meant that after that time couples who did not have their marriages solemnised were none the less validly married in the eyes of the Church if they had, even privately, consented to be married. They were not involved in ‘unmarriages’, as one writer seems to have recently put it.

We cannot know how many couples, particularly those of lower status, had their marriages solemnised in thirteenth-century England (pp. 82–3). For the portion of those of lower status who held their land freely, however, a secular requirement, in addition to their parish priest's urging, would have encouraged such a solemnisation. A widow was not entitled to dower unless she had been endowed publicly at the church door (Bracton fo. 92).

Errors are few and, for the most part, trivial. For example, the archdeacon of Canterbury's court in the second half of the thirteenth century did not hear appeals from the courts of the suffragan bishops of the province. That was the function of the archbishop's court of Arches, records from which are used to good effect (p. 76). First Peter is not ‘an early thirteenth-century theological moralistic treatise’ (p. 131), but, rather, the twenty-first book in the Vulgate New Testament, an obvious slip that a supposedly respectable publisher should have caught.

This is an elegantly written and significant book; everyone who is interested in medieval marriage should read it.