Marriage and the control of marriage were central to the firm bonding of medieval society: everyone had an interest in it, from the parties marrying to their wider circle of family and friends to local jurors and the magistrates responsible for social order and control. Appropriate and lasting marriages were a prerequisite for stable, well-regulated households, the building block of society, in which everyone accepted his or her allotted role and destiny. Order within the household helped to guarantee a wider social order. The householder made a key contribution, bearing responsibility for the state of his own marriage, his wife's chastity and decorum, and the sexual encounters and marriages of his dependents. But he was also responsible, as a member of a local community, for helping to ensure that others met their obligations too, by criticizing and reporting their failures.

Shannon McSheffrey's important study explores this nexus in the context of late medieval London. She gave a tantalizing glimpse of the sources on which this study is based in her short booklet of sources in translation, Love and Marriage in Late Medieval London (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, for TEAMS, 1995), but this monograph offers the opportunity for a much fuller exploration of the material. Testimony from the London Consistory Court is complemented by evidence from wardmotes, city administrative courts, and wills and testaments. The church court evidence is particularly illuminating. Apart from the content of the pleadings concerning marriage suits, adultery and fornication prosecutions, and slander, there is a wealth of circumstantial detail. The courts called for a great deal of information from deponents, about when, where, and in whose presence the alleged events (a betrothal, an insult, an adulterous encounter) took place, and often recorded the words exchanged at the time. Part of the value of the book is simply the numerous stories and details recounted, but McSheffrey's reading of the material offers new insights into gender, domestic space, and patriarchal authority.

The book falls into two parts: the first, on law and social practice in the making of marriage in late medieval London, being considerably longer than the second, on governance, sex, and civic morality. There is a particularly useful discussion of marriage formation in chapter 1, making sense of the relationships among betrothal, binding contract, and solemnization and the increasing importance attached to the last of these. London, a large and varied city, offered a wide range of potential marriage partners, though it was not yet the marriage market that it was to become. London's openness to migration and social advancement could have meant that young men and women had to negotiate marriage with less help from parents and kin and perhaps more uncertainties about character, background, and resources, but masters, mistresses, and the City fathers stepped in to mediate the process. Individuals clearly had some choice, but approval and support remained crucial. But McSheffrey's study goes beyond a review of marriage itself—fascinating though that is—to draw a subtle and convincing portrait of late medieval London society, sensitive to the particularities of period and locality. She suggests the various ways in which moral norms were proclaimed and embedded and describes the circles of community that helped to enforce them. She also points out that different groups in London—aristocrats, professionals, clerics, and citizens—might have differing views of sex and reputation, so that marriage- and sex-related litigation highlighted real cultural tensions.

McSheffrey's book picks up some of the themes of Marjorie McIntosh's Controlling Misbehaviour in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), discussed in this journal (Journal of British Studies 37, no. 3 [1998]) in a symposium to which McSheffrey contributed. McIntosh took a long and wide view of the subject, and her book was particularly notable for its engagement with the problem of medieval/early modern periodization. In her way, McSheffrey addresses this problem too, but with different priorities, arguing that breadth must be complemented by depth and that “the local study presents a better picture of the lived experience of medieval people than the broader study that skims over the surface of many cultures and times” (4). She takes a very short span, 1450–1500, but this allows her to cover most if not all the surviving written sources for the place and period. This gives an unusual depth and richness to her account, avoiding a generalized “later middle ages” and setting the narratives of her protagonists in a well-realized historical moment. Such specificity also allows her to conclude that apparent differences between the situation she is discussing and those described by others are probably real. She suggests, for example, that control of marriage was tightening generally in the later fifteenth century but that London may have led the way, a point that might connect with the growing divergence in demographic and economic growth between London and most other English towns. Her precise focus will also encourage useful comparison between marriage and female reputation in late fifteenth-century London and in later sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London, as explored by Laura Gowing (Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London [Oxford: Clarendon, 1996]) and Loreen Giese (Courtship, Marriage Customs, and Shakespeare's Comedies [New York: Palgrave, 2006]). The book thus makes as important a contribution to comparative studies as to the subject of its own focus, late medieval London.