Men’s Honour, Women’s Lives

Peter Burke

• Trial by Impotence: Virility and Marriage in Pre-Revolutionary France by Pierre Darmon, translated by Paul Keegan
  Chatto, 234 pp, £10.95, March 1985, ISBN 0 7011 2914 X
• The Boundaries of Eros: Sex, Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice by Guido Ruggiero
  Oxford, 223 pp, £25.00, March 1985, ISBN 0 19 503465 1
• The Tuscans and their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 by David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber
  Yale, 404 pp, £32.00, March 1985, ISBN 0 300 03056 8
• Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy by Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, translated by Lydia Cochrane
  Chicago, 338 pp, £25.50, September 1985, ISBN 0 226 43925 9
• French Women in the Age of Enlightenment edited by Samia Spencer
  Indiana, 429 pp, $35.00, November 1984, ISBN 0 253 32481 5

‘And if you know of any impediments, either of consanguinity, affinity or spiritual relationship, or of any other reason why these two should not be joined in holy matrimony, you are bound to declare the same to us as soon as possible.’ As a child, hearing the banns read out in church, I used to wonder idly what kind of ‘other reason’ there might be. In fact, the canon lawyers distinguish quite a number of such reasons, including force, error, insanity, homosexuality, and also impotence, the subject of Pierre Darmon’s study, published in French in 1979 and now available in English translation.