While some scholars of marriage litigation in late medieval England, such as Richard Helmholz and Shannon McSheffrey, have cautioned that we should not view medieval divorce as divorce in the modern sense, Sara Butler does not shy away from making such comparisons. Butler's study encompasses three different types of divorce. First, divorcium a mensa et thoro, a judicial separation in which the couple remained married but no longer had to live together. Second, divorcium a vinculo, an annulment by the church, which held that the marriage had never been valid. Third, Butler explores what Helmholz once dubbed “self-divorce,” whereby a couple might end their marriage informally, without going through the official channels. For Butler, this “comes closest to our modern usage of divorce” (3).

Butler's study is chiefly concerned with the practice rather than the theory of medieval divorce. Questions she asks include the following: Why did a spouse leave? To whom did they turn for help? What difficulties did individuals encounter during and after the process of divorce? What financial support could a divorced spouse expect? What happened to the wedding gifts? Who gained custody of the children? Did the children of divorced parents carry “emotional baggage”? and How did individuals prove they were divorced? In order to answer such questions, Butler uses a wide range of sources, chiefly papal petitions, Episcopal registers, cause papers, Year Books, close and patent rolls, eyre and coroners' rolls, manorial and mayor's court records, and chancery bills. One of the key features of this study is that Butler uses case studies derived from tracking individuals through a number of sources. For example, she tells the story of the forced marriage of Alice Crome, widow of a fifteenth-century Norwich merchant, using a calendar of papal registers, a calendar of patent rolls, four chancery bills, and Alice's last will and testament. But as a result of this approach, Butler shies away from making statistical claims about divorce rates. She also argues that the “frequency of self-divorce undercuts our efforts to count cases” (5), because self-divorce is “not as visible” (4).

One of Butler's findings is that English suits for separation were dominated by the linked allegations of adultery and cruelty, for the most part claimed by women but with a few male suits from the very late medieval period. Butler explains this finding in a twofold manner: because of contemporary explanations of masculinity, not many men would have been willing to admit publicly that they were victims of abuse at the hands of their wives; and men did not appear as often as plaintiffs in marital litigation because they did not need to resort to lawsuits to fund their future existence. Butler argues that self-divorce was “more typical” (4), though, because the court process was expensive and drawn out as the church sought to uphold rather than dissolve marriages. While a study of self-divorces should give a more realistic perspective on why marriages failed because there was no need to conform to legal criteria, those cases that can be found in the records usually do not record this information. However, in Butler's few examples of “runaway wives,” a husband's cruelty did not appear to have been the dominant factor and female adultery was “probably a symptom of a faltering marriage rather than the cause” (38).

Butler emphasizes the risks for women attempting a divorce, both physical and financial, and also the risks for their children, and those family and friends who helped them. That women still attempted to secure divorces, and family and friends did help, leads Butler to argue that “[t]his is not a story of women as victims. . . . Divorce proceedings draw attention to women at their best in terms of gritty resolution and independent action” (149). She also argues, though, that most women probably remarried in order to survive in a breadwinner economy, an assertion that is backed up with reference to Sandy Bardsley's argument that women were paid less than able-bodied, adult males. Another key element in Butler's account is the role played by the common law doctrine of coverture in affecting, for example, a separated wife's access to financial support and to her own property.

It is to Butler's credit that she asks difficult questions, but on some occasions she has to content herself with a few suggestive examples. This is particularly the case in the chapter “What Happened to the Children?' but also in the sections concerned with alimony. Nevertheless, this is a lively and interesting study, which deserves to be read by all scholars and students of women and gender, marriage, and the law in late medieval England. My minor quibble is about inconsistencies in the book's scholarly apparatus, which perhaps stem from Butler's desire to offer both a research monograph and a teaching text. On some occasions, we are given the manuscript references for sources “as cited in” a secondary text. However, when Butler references the Year Books, she frequently just gives folio references, despite singling out in the acknowledgments the use she made of Seipp's online index, which numbers every case. All quotations have been translated into modern English for accessibility, but if students are a key audience, then technical terms like fee-simple and fee-tail (97) should perhaps have been explained. Similarly, ex officio actions are glossed on page 6 and page 62, but not on page 31, and the term does not feature in the very brief index.