Charles Donahue Jr, LAW, MARRIAGE AND SOCIETY IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES: ARGUMENTS ABOUT MARRIAGE IN FIVE COURTS Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ( www.cambridge.org ), 2007. xix + 672 pp. ISBN 9780521877282. £80.

In this important and eagerly awaited contribution to the history of medieval marriage, Professor Donahue identifies similarities and differences in the implementation of the rules of marriage in the canon law of the medieval church. Over the past quarter of a century, Donahue has searched the archives of Europe to source evidence for such a study and in this monograph he presents the results of a comprehensive analysis of five courts in Northern Europe. Donahue has produced a substantial printed work of some 650 pages. However, in what must be characterised as a controversial decision, the author's extensive original manuscript has been edited to reduce its length, and much of the scholarly apparatus has been removed to be made available (without charge) as a further 350 pages of “Texts and Commentary” on the publisher's internet site.

Donahue's study concentrates on the courts in northern Europe, the area of western Christendom that is currently best-known in the Anglophone literature (not least because of his own past contributions). The book includes descriptions of the practice of five ecclesiastical courts on both sides of the English Channel: two English courts (the archiepiscopal see of York and the bishopric of Ely) and courts in Paris, Cambrai and Brussels. The material is diverse and sensitively handled. Throughout the book Donahue is careful not to fall into the ever-present trap of simply telling a good story or over-applying modern theories of gender and sexuality. His readings are based on a profound familiarity with the material and a deep and sophisticated understanding of the medieval canon law of marriage. As a consequence, Donahue leads the reader to an appreciation of the differences between the materials preserved by the five courts and presents the manifold ways in which these archives were preserved. Along the way, he provides important lessons in why such differences matter. In several cases Donahue is able to provide explanations for the motivations behind their compilation and even gives biographical sketches of the men who put them together. In addition, Donahue accounts for the methodological choices he made to reach his conclusions and takes issue with previous scholarship in the field, a task he undertakes with elegance and grace, raising important questions along the way.

His chosen material is diverse: in some cases, such as the already well-researched York cause paper material, Donahue manages to present startlingly new insights gathered from new approaches and a careful re-examination of the surviving fourteenth- and fifteenth-century material. In other cases, such as the court of Cambrai whose almost three thousand recorded sentences would have overwhelmed less experienced scholars, the material may appear unwieldy but Donahue makes eminently sensible choices about presentation and interpretation. In the end, even though Donahue has made the decision to sample the Cambrai material, his book includes an analysis of more than one thousand cases, and against this background his thoughts concerning the litigants’ social origins, local variations in case-load, and the application of the learned law in practice will be of crucial importance to anyone with even the slightest interest in medieval marriage.

There is much to be praised in this book, but its length and the complexity of its subject matter make it unsuited for the undergraduate – and heavy going even for the very interested – reader. But there is another reason why this book may not reach as large a group of readers as it should: the decision to combine a traditional monograph with an on-line scholarly apparatus. There are probably two reasons behind this. On the one hand, Donahue has often lamented the lack of speed with which translations, or even just Latin working texts, of medieval court material reach the general public and has advocated online publication to make such material more widely available. On the other hand, it is also clear that publishers increasingly regard edited Latin texts as expensive, needless and irrelevant. In this publication Donahue has allowed his publisher to take a novel approach that is excellent in conception but which is not as well executed by the publisher as it could have been. The decision to publish the “Text and Commentaries” separately is a novelty which severely restrains enjoyment of the book and it is distressing to see that this decision is not clearly advertised. Had I known the level of technological investment that is necessary, I would have been less quick to spend the £80 charged by CUP for the book. In order to appreciate fully the insights offered by this author, who is not only a first-class scholar but also a meticulous researcher, the reader requires uninterrupted access to several media. Such multi-media manipulation is not negotiable but a necessity that is not only extremely inconvenient but either ties the activity of reading to one physical desktop location or forces the reader to balance simultaneously a laptop and a heavy book. I did try one possible solution to this problem: to use the electronic version of the book (which is offered at the same price as the hard-cover version). The electronic text does include the “Texts and Commentaries” and other parts of the scholarly apparatus, but CUP's digital rights management software means that the file format chosen is not readable on all e-book readers: my own Iliad does not read it and I have been informed by the manufacturers that they will not be updating the software to handle CUP's chosen Adobe Bookshelf format (against this background one must dread the consequences of another threat: the impending release of Windows 7). In addition, the installation process is cumbersome in the extreme and the software only allows the reader to print off hard-copy of a miserly twenty pages from a book whose page count is only two short of one thousand. The programming of the electronic book is also not user-friendly: in the hard-cover book, footnotes cryptically refer to “Disc T&C no 13” or “Lit T&C no 12”. I hoped that these footnotes in the body of the e-book would be hyper-linked to the “T&C”. But – though the footnote numbers are coloured blue as if they were hypertext links and the cursor changes to the hand-symbol that indicates a hypertext link – it is not possible to jump forward from the text to the “T&C”, but it is possible to jump backward from the “T&C” to the footnote. The in-text references to graphs and tables, however, work fine. The responsibility for this poor programming must be laid squarely at the feet of the publishers who, by their penny-pinching decision and poor programming, have created an unwieldy electronic volume. This is twice a pity, because this is an outstanding piece of scholarship and research that, even with these irritating failures, should be a standard work for years to come.