uses unpublished Paris archdeaconry court records (supplemented with other unpublished church court data) to show how widespread “unmarriages” were in later medieval Paris. The rest of the book deals with topics more familiar to specialists. The angle and em- phasis are new because previous scholars have been pri- marily interested in the advance of the church’s control over marriage, whereas Karras concentrates on unions outside those limits; that is the theory at least, although a lot of the book does in fact go over territory reason- ably well-traveled in earlier studies on marriage. Thus the chapter on the “The Church and the Regulation of Unions” is as much about marriage as about unmar- riage. We revisit the Lothar II-Waldrada-Theutberga cause ce ´le `bre, Abelard and He ´loise (with free specula- tion on how He ´loise might have felt), Gratian, clandes- tine marriage, and the Philip Augustus-Ingeborg case (with free speculation on what turned Philip off). Fa- miliar though most of the material in these earlier chap- ters will be to specialists, Karras nonetheless performs a valuable service by representing it in an accessible form that will be very helpful to anyone approaching the subject for the first time. Scholars should wherever possible write in such a way as to draw first-year un- dergraduates into their field and Karras does so beau- tifully. The chapter on “unequal unions” looks at sexual connections between powerful men and serving girls or slaves, the famous case of Katherine Swynford, unions with women of lower status in the Scandinavian North, and sexual relations between Christians and Jews or Muslims. Karras concludes that it “was much more ac- ceptable for an unmarried man to be sexually involved with a woman of lower status, economically, legally, or religiously, than it was for an unmarried woman, and more acceptable for a married man than a married woman to conduct a relationship on the side” (p. 114). With the chapter on priestly concubinage we are again on fairly familiar ground (although some of the inter- pretative generalizations seem arbitrary, such as the au- thor’s claim on p. 133 that the influence of marriage symbolism declined), but once again Karras performs a service in presenting the subject, and some fresh ma- terial, in a user-friendly way to a new generation of me- dievalists. There are some mistakes. On page 53 Karras refers to the “church’s view of marriage as indissoluble (ex- cept with papal dispensation, which underscored papal authority).” Popes did from the fifteenth century claim to be able to dissolve marriages that were valid but un- consummated, a small but non-trivial category, but Kar- ras’s reference to a more general power has no basis in papal history that I know of. Again, on page 57 she states that “final vows were supposed to be exchanged . . . in front of the church . . . Any marriage that was not concluded publicly at church was considered clandes- tine.” This holds good for many parts of Europe but not generally. Karras explains (p. 9) that she would have gladly dealt with same-sex unions had there been more data to work on, but less explicable is her limitation of the book’s remit to unions of only two people. As in most societies outside the Greco-Roman tradition, more or less official polygyny was quite normal in the upper ech- elons of society in the early Middle Ages and later than that in Spain and the Scandinavian North. If the focus is not to be on “Christian marriage,” then the exclusion of high-status secondary wives seems arbitrary. The ex- planation may the book’s explicitly presentist agenda: Karras wants to show the “inherent illogic of claims that there is only one ‘real’ form of marriage” (p. 1) and seems to want to provide historical precedent for the quasi-marital “partnership” relations normal today. But demonstrating that wife-beating was prevalent in the Middle Ages would not be an argument for its ac- ceptance today. Similarly, discussion of semi-official high-status polygyny would have made intellectual sense without encouraging modern elites to do likewise. In actual fact, polygyny or at least bigamy does receive the prominence it deserves in that many of the “un- marital unions” Karras studies involved a man who was already married to somebody else. Perhaps the finding that there were serious relation- ships between men and women outside wedlock in the Middle Ages will not astonish. In an ideal world there would have been a chapter on the role of such rela- tionships in medieval romances. Nonetheless, this study is a real contribution to our knowledge of marriage in the Middle Ages and also to the popularization of spe- cialist knowledge by a scholar with a refreshingly per- sonal voice. There is much to be grateful for. DAVID D’AVRAY University College London MARTHA BAYLESS. Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture: The Devil in the Latrine. (Routledge Studies in Medieval Lit- erature and Culture, number 2.) New York: Routledge. 2012. Pp. xxi, 242. $125.00. Compared with the monumental studies of the nine- teenth-century development of urban sewage systems, interest in the medieval cultural signification of excre- ment has been relatively slow in taking off. Offering a useful counterpoint to Susan Signe Morrison’s Excre- ment in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics (2008), Martha Bayless focuses on the theo- logical and moral meanings of excrement across the long medieval period. Bayless argues that scatology is less comic than readers of Chaucer might think. Using conceptual metaphor theory, which asserts that “down” (the lower half of the body and its products) can be mapped onto “evil,” and making supple use of work in the psychology of emotion by Paul Rozin and his col- leagues, Bayless makes a strong case for the equation of her title: excrement is inextricably associated with sinfulness in medieval thought. Even in fabliaux, where the genre does not normally encourage explicit mor- alizing, the devil is never far away when shit, piss, and arses are in question. The first chapter outlines the theoretical positions that structure the book: how the association between 232 Reviews of Books AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2014 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/119/1/232/20518 by guest on 11 October 2021