In the conclusion to her monograph, Chanelle Delameillieure writes that “This book hopes to carry forward historians’ understanding of how the particular legal regime applied to women, young people and their families in dealing with marriage-making in fifteenth-century Brabant and Flanders, while at the same time contributing to more general questions about women, marriage and the law in late medieval Europe” (209). Her impressive study of 650 abduction cases undoubtedly achieves and indeed exceeds these aims. This book will be essential reading for scholars working on abduction, marriage, consent, women, and family relationships in medieval Europe. Delameillieure offers thorough knowledge of scholarship on abduction and marriage in medieval Europe, an insightful view of her particular context and primary sources, and a clear argument about the process of abduction and its aftermath in the late medieval Low Countries, while maintaining a critical sense of the nuances, complexities, and unknowns of the sources she presents throughout.
In her introduction, Delameillieure sets out the key characteristics of abduction in the
late medieval Low Countries, where it referred to taking a person (usually but not
always a woman) for marital or “romantic” purposes, consensually or non-consensually.
The Middle Dutch term for abduction with marital intent, Delameillieure’s primary focus,
was
The first chapter, “Perks and Perils of Being an Heiress,” explores why abductions with marital intent were criminalized so early and severely in the Low Countries. Delameillieure argues that this can only be understood within the specific inheritance system operative in this context, and with a recognition of the varied social classes this inheritance system affected. She suggests that the greater inheritance rights accorded to women in the Low Countries may have afforded them less rather than more agency in making marriages, since more parties had vested interests in their marriage because it entailed the movement of property. In addition, urban elites and middle-class people like merchants and artisans (who are also represented in abduction case records) wielded significant influence in the Low Countries due to their important role in city life and the political power accorded to cities. Their concern for their family’s property and reputation may have led them to support and enact laws against abduction with marital intent. These two circumstances, Delameillieure argues, explain the early and severe criminalization of abduction with martial intent in the Low Countries in comparison with elsewhere in Europe.
Chapter 2, “Abduction’s Who, How, and Why,” sets out in detail one of the key arguments of the book: that abduction should not be seen as a conflict between two people. Delameillieure argues that abductions are, for the most part, not simple cases involving one abductee suing their abductor, nor indeed the “abductee” standing up to their parents in the case of consensual abduction. She sets out clearly and persuasively the need to understand abduction in its precise social setting, as a phenomenon that involved “many different parties in complex social constellations” (85). One of her particularly useful contributions is to challenge the idea of generational conflict as a dominant pattern in abduction cases. Delameillieure’s findings show that familial conflict often played a part in abduction, but that this conflict was not always split along generational lines; abduction cases could reflect differing priorities within a broader family network. As part of this argument, she shows that parents and children were not necessarily opposed in their views of marriage, challenging the traditional view of this relationship as potentially antagonistic to show more balanced relationships between parents and children, and highlighting the ways in which children understood and valued their parents’ motives and opinions for their marriages. This chapter persuasively challenges dominant understandings of abduction as reflecting a consensual or non-consensual relationship between two people, arguing that we must take into account broader influences and the wider social context in order to properly understand individual cases.
In “Consent In and Out of the Courtroom,” Delameillieure argues persuasively for the value of studying consent through abduction cases, in addition to the more commonly explored areas of marital and sexual consent. Delameillieure draws attention throughout this chapter to the difficulty of recovering consent through formulaic legal documents, in which the statements made were often highly strategic and could contradict each other. Records often show extremes, with the event portrayed as either “very consensual or very violent” (141), rather than the more nuanced scenarios that must often have occurred. Delameillieure nonetheless manages to excavate evidence for how laypeople understood consent through their strategic statements, drawing parallels with modern understandings of consent as communicated willingness. A crucial point raised in this chapter is that consent was at times acknowledged as occurring on a spectrum, and as a process. Consent could change and/or could be ambivalent in cases of abduction. Here, Delameillieure works with the phrase “partly with and partly against her will” to explore evidence for gradations of consent and coercion. Her exploration of abduction as a process rather than a single event resonates with Shannon McSheffrey’s work on medieval marriage and adds helpful nuance to the ways in which the abductee’s perspective could differ at various moments within the process.
Chapter 4, “What Authorities Did to Help,” explores the ways in which common law and church courts intervened in abduction marriage cases. Delameillieure points out that strict legislation was often watered down in practice, with the consequences for abduction less severe than the threatened penalties (though severe penalties were meted out at times). Many cases were settled out of court through a financial settlement. Others were punished with sentences to pilgrimage, sometimes in combination with a fine. Abducted women were often also sentenced, in line with the emphasis on punishing consensual abduction, but disinheritance was only rarely applied as a penalty, even though it was often the prescribed penalty. This chapter also explores regional and chronological variations in terms of how abduction was punished. Particularly interesting is Delameillieure’s consideration of why abductions tended to be punished in clusters, investigating contemporary political and social factors that might have caused abduction to be treated more severely or overlooked in different contexts. She also finds evidence for inconsistencies between canon law and consistory court practice, particularly in the Brussels consistory court, which frequently punished abductees for marrying without their parents’ consent. Despite the difficulties women faced in proving that they were coerced into marriage through abduction, Delameillieure uncovers evidence for strategic uses of canon law, such as abductees contracting a second marriage strategically, which may have been a way to ensure they were not forced to remain married to their abductors. In doing so, she suggests that abductees, abductors, and their families show knowledge of canon law and an ability to use this to their advantage in consistory court cases.
The conclusion reflects on the specific qualities of the late medieval Low Countries and the ways they affected abduction law and practice, reiterating the importance of the gender-blind inheritance system, the power of cities, and the influence of the middling classes in this context. Delameillieure weighs up the evidence for the importance attributed to consent, suggesting that there are many examples in which women’s consent made a difference to the outcome of legal proceedings, but that consent should not be interpreted as free choice since it takes place in very constrained circumstances. The conclusion emphasizes the collective nature of abduction, the links between church and state in their approaches to abduction cases, and the legal knowledge displayed by laypeople who took their cases to court and used this knowledge to try and obtain the outcome they wanted.
Delameillieure studies her sources with care, precision, and nuance. She acknowledges throughout that there are crucial limits to what the legal record can and cannot show us, maintaining a critical distance from her sources and ensuring she differentiates between what the record tells us and what we might plausibly extrapolate from that. She attends to local and chronological variations in patterns of abduction and its representation in court cases throughout the book, with particularly interesting findings in terms of when abduction cases most frequently appear in court records and why this might be, attending to precise political and social contexts. This is an important book that makes a clear case for the wider significance and value of its findings, as well as attending to nuances particular to the society of the Low Countries. This reviewer heartily recommends this monograph, which is thankfully available open access from Amsterdam University Press.