This edited volume takes as its subject what editors David M. Luebke and Mary Lindemann call (in the subtitle) “transgressive unions in Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment.” The transgressive qualities of these unions, as the contributions to the volume demonstrate, ran the gamut from clerical marriages and pastoral concubinage, to marriages that crossed lines of status and rank. Unions that included ethnic, racial, or confessional diversity, as well as pairings that challenged incest prohibitions, are also included under the label.

The types of marital and sexual partnership covered in the volume are not especially surprising, and historians of sexuality will easily identify a large number of illicit desires, practices, and “sexual pair-bonds” (3) that could have also been included but were not. One would expect to find some reaction to the Reformation and to Martin Luther's attempt to imagine new marital possibilities for priests, including bigamy—as David M. Whitford shows in his contribution to the volume—for their sexual practices had long been the subject of speculation, if not investigation. One can easily imagine marriages that bridged confession or race or rank as being troubling for their novelty and for the threat (whether real or imagined) to power, inheritance, and community that they represented. And incest is, of course, a logical area of inquiry, despite the fact that the precise definition of the term remained a moving target subject to all sorts of legal, social, and religious pressures. The volume succeeds best when it offers detailed insight into how Germans navigated each of these enduring zones of transgression in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. While the broad categories of illicit marriage remained relatively unchanged over this period, the creativity that people brought to their attempts to undermine or enforce various norms revealed a surprising degree of historical transformation.

This volume will be useful to scholars researching and teaching a range of topics, from German history and the history of sexuality, to religious and legal studies. The essays by Whitford, Wolfgang Breul, and Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer deepen our understanding of how the Reformation affected religious conceptions of marriage in sixteenth-century Germany. Especially valuable are the arguments in the first half of the book, where Ralf-Peter Fuchs, Michael Sikora, Dagmar Freist, Daniel Riches, and Alexander Schunka discuss the social and political dynamics of mixed matches, thereby illuminating how honor codes, morganatic relationships, family structures, inheritance patterns, and dynastic aspirations were all transformed by shifting marital possibilities. Antje Flüchter's essay on unions between Germans employed by the Dutch East India Company and non-European women globalizes some of the significant issues at hand, while Claudia Jarzebowski's contribution on incest and emotion takes the volume into the historiographical territory covered by the history of emotions. Mary Lindemann's essay on reading, law, and incest allows us to understand how enlightenment practices shaped both popular and legal understandings of the problem. Joel Harrington's worthy afterword—beginning with the insight that marriage provides a perfect way to understand the “perplexing and slippery” problem of “social propriety” (204)—offers a helpful analysis of why the early modern period was an especially significant period in the history of marriage, as well as for what he calls the “public-private balance” (205) within which people lived their lives.

David Luebke explains in the introduction that the book came about within the context of heated debates in North America and Europe during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries about the fundamental definition of marriage and what constitutes a legally sanctioned union. The essays in the volume confirm his assertion that “marriage never possessed the unity and stability… that the modern defenders of tradition assume” (3), an issue that has surfaced again in the wake of the legalization of same-sex unions in the United States. Indeed, this insight may be the signal contribution of this rich collection of essays: marriage may be an important institution valued in many societies, but, at its heart, it is historical and therefore subject to change and modification. The essays included in Mixed Matches show that there is little that is “natural” about how a legitimate marriage has been constituted. Yet, there is much to learn from the experience of Germans who sought to define and understand unions—both transgressive and not—during the period between the Reformation and the Enlightenment.