| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.1

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.1 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

"Faire les noces": Le mariage de la noblesse française (1375–1475). By Geneviéve Ribordy (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2004).

This is a excellent study that does even more than what it claims to do: investigate the practice and celebration of marriage among the French nobility from 1375–1475. The sources used are not the usual ecclesiastical court cases, but those generated by criminal cases in the Parlement of Paris between 1375 and 1474 (for which Ribordy found 48 cases concerning marriage from all parts of France). This was the court to which the great lords might have recourse in situations of murder or rape and its records concern the most aristocratic stratum. She also uses requests for letters of remission to have cases dismissed from the courts (52 new cases found by reading every other year through the same period, plus 11 requests providing more information on the 48 cases before Parlement), and over forty literary sources, including the seven major chronicles that cover this period in the history of France widely construed (to include border areas under the control of the Dukes of Burgundy, as well as Brittany, Savoy, Gascony, Provence, and Flanders.) The common factor among those sources is that all concern the vision and creation of a marriage, and the practice of its negotiation and celebration, and provide considerable detail about noble marriage at the time. She finds that three marriage stories were particularly fascinating to the chroniclers of the time: that of Richard II of England to Isabelle of France, the two successive marriages of Jacqueline of Bavaria (first to John of Brabant and then while John was still living, to Humphrey, duke of Gloucester), and that of Henry V of England to Catherine of France.

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