Connor McCarthy's book presents a new view of medieval marriage as complex and contradictory, resisting an impulse to promulgate an overly homogenized view of medieval marriage that is sometimes seen in existing scholarship. The book traces "not only the contradictions between the ecclesiastical and secular attitudes to marriage, but also the contradictions within them" (5). McCarthy draws on literary texts, primary source materials (emphasizing laws and court cases, but also theology, penitentials, and hagiography) and an impressively wide range of secondary scholarship on the theological, legal, and social history of marriage.
Each of the thematically organized chapters offers nuanced and perceptive insight into a specific tension within medieval marriage theory and legal practice. In his first chapter, "The Principle of Consent," McCarthy makes the fascinating point that theologians who developed the consensual model of marriage, such as Augustine, connected marital consent to the intentions of the speakers who made the vows, but in the ecclesiastical courts the exchange of consent became "less a matter of inner intentions than a matter of verbal formulae" (50) which must be identified to prove a marriage valid. McCarthy also makes the important and interesting argument that the consensual theory of marriage seemed to "confer legitimacy upon privately contracted unions that ignore the ecclesiastical regulations with regard to contracting in front of a church, in the presence of a priest, subsequent to the threefold reading of the banns" (28). In his second chapter on "Marriage and Property," McCarthy observes that the Church's consensual model "was at odds with" an "emphasis on the roles of property and the interests of the wider kin group in establishing marriages" (51). In a detailed account of married property law, McCarthy traces a number of specific problems that arose out of this conflict, such as the apparent contradiction between the right to arrange a ward's marriage and the ward's own free consent to marry, and tensions in questions of legitimacy and women's testamentary rights.
Chapter 3, "Marriage as Alliance," argues that despite the Church's emphasis on the free consent of individuals in the creation of the marriage bond, "the idea of marriage as an alliance between family members persists into the late Middle Ages" (91). In Chapter 4, McCarthy responds to C.S. Lewis's notorious claim for the incompatibility of love and marriage, tracing instead the careful distinctions made by theologians between maritalis affectio and other more carnal kinds of love. Chapter 5 traces the Church's ambiguous attitudes towards marital sex in theological and penitential writings, in which, for example, clergy often treated marital sex as sinful while ecclesiastical courts enforced the wives' promise in marriage vows "to be bonere and buxom in bedde and ate borde" (114) and, for another example, hagiographical accounts promoted the virtues of chaste marriages but did not encourage readers to emulate them. Chapter 6, "Marriage and Family," is somewhat diffuse, addressing the promotion of exogamy, absolute monogamy, kinship and childhood. Chapter 7, "After Marriage," is more specifically focused on literature than other chapters, linking Chaucer's portrait of the Wife to changes in circumstances for widows in later fourteenth-century England to argue that "increased numbers, access to legal and property rights, and ecclesiastical suspicion, may have simultaneously made them a marginalized grouping, and, paradoxically, a visible challenge to masculine authority in the second half of the fourteenth century" (158).
The governing thesis of the book is a broad one: "that marriage in medieval England is overdetermined--essentially overregulated and overgoverned" (4). Instead of a specific claim about the meaning of medieval marriage, the book presents a more modest goal: "to offer something of an overview of legal and literary writing relating to [marriage in] medieval England" (7). The book is indeed an overview, addressing literary texts from a range of genres and periods, including Beowulf, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde and the Legends of Good Women, Piers Plowman, The Book of Margery Kempe, the Paston letters and many other texts. McCarthy's analysis is in a "crux-busting" tradition, applying an unprecedented precision of legal analysis to a series of short passages with compelling results. To pick a few of his most interesting examples, in Chapter One, McCarthy critiques H.A. Kelly's argument that a clandestine marriage exists between Troilus and Criseyde. Whereas Kelly claims that the formula in Alexander III Ego te accipio in meam is sufficient to create a marriage, McCarthy points to R.H. Helmholz's findings that in marriage litigation a specific reference to marriage was required to enforce a clandestine contract. According to McCarthy, "Kelly's argument rests partly upon intentions: for the most part, medieval ecclesiastical courts found intentions very difficult to measure, and so opted instead to rely upon measuring the forms of words" (48). McCarthy also discusses the depiction of Mede in Piers Plowman as an attack on marriages for financial gain that puts the spiritual aspect of marriage into question. He treats the Knight's Tale as exploration of marriage as peace treaty and the Franklin's and Merchant's tales as turning on distinctions between marital affection and other kinds of love. Drawing on a detailed understanding of married women's property law, McCarthy explains Margery Kempe's much-talked about ability to pay her husband's debts despite the law of couverture which give a husband control of his wife's property during their marriage and he also discusses Kempe's engagement with spiritual marriage.
Although McCarthy contextualizes his book in a new strand of criticism that addresses law and literature as, in Richard Firth Green's words, "parallel forms of discourse," (3) at times the book seems located in another strand of legal and literary studies described by Green: one that seeks to identify legal practices in literary texts. Literary analysis tends to occur in the second part of each chapter, where literature is shown to illustrate the tensions in medieval marriage laws and theology laid out in the first portion. Literary representations of marriage in this book are thus depicted primarily as reflecting existing theology and law (however contradictory) rather than doing their own ideological work. McCarthy does, however, invoke the classic Althusserian notion of ideology in the introduction as "the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (4). From this notion McCarthy makes the convincing assertion that ideology influences practice, but he also collapses the distinction between ideology and practice, asserting that "ideologies are ideas which are expressed through actual material practices" (4). A sharper distinction between ideology and practice might also have been productive in Chapter 5 where McCarthy argues that Church teachings on marital sex (manifested in such prescriptive genres as theology and penitentials) can be taken as unproblematic evidence "about the nature of ecclesiastical intervention and about actual practice" (107). Although McCarthy is careful to indicate his intention is "not to argue against the existence of historical change in medieval thinking about marriage," (159) in practice his decision to move between Anglo-Saxon and late medieval materials within each chapter limits his ability to tie shifting marital ideology to changing social and political contexts. Nonetheless, this structure succeeds in highlighting "continuities in thinking about marriage," as McCarthy suggests.
Marriage in Medieval England is an ambitious, careful and well-researched account that introduces a new level of juridical subtlety to the analysis of a wide range of medieval marriage texts and provides an insightful characterization of specific tensions within marriage laws and theology. This book will also be a useful guide for those seeking a manageably brief overview of the broad and fast-growing multidisciplinary scholarship on the law, theology and literature of medieval marriage.