In Marriage and the Law in the Age of Khubilai Khan: Cases from the Yuan dianzhang, Bettine Birge presents the first translation in any language of chapter (juan 卷) 18, on the topic of marriage, from the Yuan dynasty legal compendium Statutes and Precedents of the Yuan Dynasty (Dayuan shengzheng guochao dianzhang 大元聖政國朝典章, or Yuan dianzhang 元典章). The Yuan dianzhang was first published in 1322, at just about the mid-point of the Mongols’ century-long rule. As Birge explains, the anonymous text was an unofficial, cheaply printed commercial publication, most likely compiled with the aid of someone who had access to government archives (pp. 57–62). It seems to have been intended as a legal handbook, and accordingly contains “local case records, judicial verdicts, imperial edicts, and administrative decisions” (p. 1). Scholars of the Yuan dynasty know the text as a treasure-trove of information about Yuan law and social life, containing information on topics seldom treated in more formal sources. It is also a very difficult text to read, written variously in literary Chinese, Yuan dynasty colloquial Chinese, and “Sino-Mongolian” (a hybrid form in which Mongolian sentences are directly transcribed, preserving Mongolian word order and syntax but substituting Chinese characters for Mongolian words) (p. 67). Birge's translation will thus be a very welcome aid to the many scholars interested in the Yuan dianzhang’s content but less well equipped than she to decipher it.

The book is divided into two parts. Part one, representing about 30 percent of the text, consists of a brief introduction and four contextualizing chapters. The introduction sets out some basic information about the differences between Chinese and Mongol marriage practices and stresses the dilemmas faced by the Yuan court in ruling a population of mixed ethnicity. Chapter 1, “The Historical and Social Context of the Yuan dianzhang,” presents a wonderfully clear and succinct political history of the interaction between China and the steppe from the mid-tenth to the mid-thirteenth centuries, as well as a brief introduction to government and society under Mongol rule. Chapter 2 describes Yuan political and legal structures in greater detail, paying particular attention to the administrative hierarchies through which legal cases traveled. Chapter 3 is devoted to a bibliographical study of the “origins, contents, and transmission” of the Yuan dianzhang text, and the very brief chapter 4 explains the technical choices and introduces the conventions that Birge adopts in her translation. The first two of the four chapters, and especially the first, are eminently suitable for undergraduate audiences; the latter two will appeal particularly to specialists. Perhaps because each chapter is intended to stand on its own, there is some repetition of information across them.

Part two, which represents the great majority of the book, is devoted to the translation itself. This part is also divided into four chapters, each containing two or more sections of the original text (which has twelve sections in all). The translation follows the order of the cases as they are presented in the Yuan dianzhang. That arrangement has the great benefit of making it easy for scholars to find and compare the translation with the original text. The downside, however, is that within each general category, the Yuan dianzhang presents cases in more or less random order, which makes it very difficult to get a sense of how the law on any particular issue changed over time. To help obviate this problem, Birge provides two useful appendices, one of which lists the cases in chronological order, and the other of which provides the dates of each case. (A third appendix translates the title page of the Yuan dianzhang.) The thorough index will also be helpful to readers who want to look up particular kinds of cases.

Birge introduces each case with a brief description of its contents and outcome, often noting how the final judgment is or is not consistent with judgments in similar cases. Her translations meticulously reproduce the “embedded document” (p. 71) format of the original text, in which each office ruling on a case quotes the report of the previous office. This allows her (and us) to follow the bureaucratic trail that each case traveled. Birge's comments are structured so that each case can be read on its own, with the result that those who read the book straight through will again notice some repetition. Still, the stand-alone structure will undoubtedly enhance the text's usefulness in the undergraduate classroom.

The cases themselves make fascinating reading, revealing both the wide variety of marriage questions that came before the Yuan court and the often creative solutions that Yuan officials devised to resolve conflicts and restore harmony. As Birge points out, the cases taken together reveal a number of general themes: the Yuan government's ambivalence about whether it should establish universal laws or separate laws for the different ethnic groups under its purview; the sometimes widely divergent attitudes of different levels and offices of government toward the same crimes; the frequent radical reversal of policy; and (surprisingly, in view of the Mongols’ reputation for violence) the generally light hand with which Yuan bureaucrats handed out punishments. Birge's own prior work has shown how the Yuan dianzhang can help us understand Yuan dynasty legal and social practice. This translation, in making an important chapter of that text more accessible, will be useful to scholars and students alike.