Book Review

In The Marriage Exchange, Martha Howell examines the evolution of marital property relations, from a practice based on custom to a system grounded on legal procedures. In uncovering this "legal reformation," as Howell calls it, The Marriage Exchange reveals the subtle and complex interaction between, on the one hand, the everyday experiences of urban people, their social and economic worlds, and their needs and adaptability at a time of shifting circumstances, and on the other hand, the law understood as the interaction of tradition, social norms, and cultural conventions. It was the tensions of family interests and the overlapping layers of custom and the law, Howell argues, that at once defined and conditioned gender hierarchies and the familial relations that ensued in one northern European town.	1
The initial picture that Howell draws in presenting Douai, one of the wealthiest cloth and drapery producing centers in the Low Countries, is a familiar one for historians of late medieval and early modern Europe. She tells the European-wide story of fourteenth-century conjunctures, of flourishing economies that suffered and then refashioned themselves, of a social order that was threatened and then recomposed as new careers and new productions were sought. Douai was no exception. This story might be well known and familiar, but its implications, as told by Howell, are neither. Instead they are intricate, multilayered, and complex.	2
Rejecting simple cause and effect explanations that point to fiscal policies and the widespread socio-economic malaise as the prime forces behind the transformation of marital property rights from custom to law, Howell views the changing social organization of this northern European town and its shifting commercial wealth not just as the contextual limits of her research but also as its conceptual boundaries. For Howell, commercial property, in the many forms and meanings that it acquired across time, was the dominating, structuring, empowering element that defined and conditioned late medieval urban society.	3
Douaisiens' "social logic" is the vector that Howell uses to understand the process of change in regulating marital property rights. Under custom this logic was expressed in the household as the independent unit of production, represented in the conjugal pair, and rooted in a spatial dimension of property. In the process of accommodating and supporting the movable and exchangeable nature of commercial wealth, the social and gender order envisioned by custom gave husbands and wives full control and flexibility over the management and transmission of the household's assets and facilitated social mobility. Between the fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries, according to Howell, the slow and partial transformation from custom to the use of marriage contracts to regulate the management of property reflected a shift in interests from household to lineage, from conjugality to kinship. Although, at first, no major change occurred in the way wealth was invested, at least for the majority of people, property ceased to be equated with and spatially limited to the unit of the household. Instead, Howell argues, a change took place in the ways Douaisiens conceived of property. In the course of the fifteenth century, as shown in marriage contracts and in last wills, they began combining the economic logic of movable goods and commercial capital to a new socio-cultural dimension of property. In light of shifting circumstances, the same commercial, movable wealth of the preceding centuries overcame its traditional spatial and economic dimensions and, in expressing the blood and memory of kin and lineage, became temporal and imaginary. According to Howell, in the course of the fifteenth century Douaisiens had begun to favor preservation of wealth over its acquisition, protection of social status over social mobility. In support of this new "logic," brides and grooms began differentiating the gifts and wealth brought into the marriage. Inheritance practices also changed from a preference given to spouses to one that favored children. In this way Douaisiens were able to preserve wealth, assure social exclusivity, and refashion their social urban identity.	4
This summary only partially captures the complexity of the story told by Martha Howell, which aims to overcome the tendency to impose a "logical and historical order" on processes that instead evolved in uneven and contradictory ways (98). The shift from traditional customary law to marriage contracts did more than just transform conjugal egalitarianism into hierarchical patrilinearity. Howell goes beyond this initial reading to analyze the deeper meanings and contradictions of custom and law as they played out in the urban context. It is in the seemingly unitary representation of husbands and wives as the conjugal pair that she finds the ambiguity of the "logic of the household." Under this property regime, men and women were united in a partnership that implied an economic "sameness" that envisioned them both as competent creators, managers, and heirs of wealth. Gender relations were imagined around this construction of women's ability to inherit and manage wealth even if women had no rights over property until widowed. However, by placing emphasis on household's accumulation of wealth and conjugality over the property of spouses, in particular by requiring that wives relinquish all their assets to the husbands as head of household, custom undermined women's power, hence overturning the concept of "sameness" and reestablishing gender hierarchy.	5
The same ambiguity that existed under custom was carried over into the new property regime. Under the law, with the adaption of the lineal property regime, the imagined equal voice of wives and husbands and the rights of widows in managing the household's assets were replaced by the superiority of the patrilineage, male dominance over family assets, and the marginalization of both wives and widows. But the losses of women came with some gains. Under the law, although wives ceased to be viewed as competent manager of wealth and widows lost their rights to exercise this competence, women could never be dispossessed of the assets they had brought into the marriage. Moreover, marriage contracts prodded a representation of "parity" that envisioned both husbands and wives under the same conjugal duties and rules concerning children, parenting, and inheritance. Just as custom contained both concepts of "sameness" and "hierarchy," the new lineal regime accommodated the dual image of "hierarchy" and "equality." They both reflected two ways of imagining and experiencing social and gender order, and in both cases, as Howell writes, "it was a matter of how property would be defined; how people would link themselves to others by means of property" (228).	6
In this way Howell succeeds in using Douai and its "legal reformation" as a window to understand how the pressures of broad conjunctures and the tensions of an urban setting shaped urban families' efforts to manage wealth, regulate familial relations, and accommodate shifting property interests that simultaneously contained communal and conjugal, hierarchical and patrilineal impulses. In the process Howell rebuts the rigid model of family organization and marriage patterns elaborated by the scholarship on the family and further developed by legal historians. Her analysis effectively undermines the traditional view that, focusing on external forces such as demographic trends, postulates the uniform, lineal, ordered inextricability of family nuclearity, the conjugal pair, and the affectionate marriage and the consequent inevitable emergence of the family as an independent legal and economic unit.	7
With The Marriage Exchange Howell has greatly contributed to our understanding of the "social and gender imaginaries" of late medieval-early modern urban societies. One of the most important conclusions to emerge from her research is that structural changes were the product of complex relationships between the multiform public and private experiences of local society and the broader social, economic, and political developments, which together generated a balance that at the same time delineated and conditioned custom, the law, and the gender relations that ensued. Howell not only reassesses the intricate and uneven paths of financial, political, legal, and cultural transformations in the organization of northern European towns between the medieval and the early modern times; she also provides a conceptual framework to understand better how urban people created and revised ways of possessing and participating in family life and ultimately gave order to their world.	8
Giovanna Benadusi University of South Florida

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