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Marriage, Family, and Law in Medieval Europe: Collected Studies. By Michael M. Sheehan, C.S.B. Edited by James K. Farge, C.S.B. (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. 1996. Pp. xi, 330. $45.00 clothbound; $21.95 paperback.)
Michael Sheehan was killed in a tragic bicycling accident at the age of sixtyseven. He left a major monograph, a revision of his doctoral dissertation on The Will in Medieval England: From the Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to the End of the Thirteenth Century,1 and a widely scattered collection of papers. The papers are all significant, and some of them are path-breaking. His memory is well served by the collection of sixteen reprinted here.
Sheehan's work focused on marriage and the family in the Middle Ages, particularly as it was reflected in English legal practice. His first major paper was an outgrowth of his study of testaments: "The Influence of Canon Law on the Property Right of Married Women in England."2 In it he showed that the dismal view that the medieval common law held of the capacity of married women to deal with...