Among the several challenges to Catholic marriage traditions during the Reformation and Counter-Reformations, it can be argued that the changing role of parental consent had the deepest repercussions, at least in France. It became a touchstone in the crisis of authority between church and state, as demonstrated by royal edicts beginning in 1556. At the beginning of the Council of Trent in 1545, the church continued to insist that couples could form legitimate unions on their own, without the benediction of a priest or the publication of bans, let alone the consent of their parents. By the time the council ended its work in 1563, the church had to a large measure reversed course, under pressure from the French Crown. French kings continued to legislate around marriage for the duration of the monarchy as control of the institution shifted away from the church, but the sixteenth century represented a dramatic turning point as both Henri II and Henri III issued edicts restricting clandestine marriage.

Other fraught questions about the institution in the sixteenth century include the relative importance of the reasons for marrying (procreation, the licit satisfaction of physical desire, the companionship of a helpmeet), the consequences of adultery, the status of widows, the indissolubility and sanctity of marriage, and its status as a sacrament. Reinforcement of the authority of families and stricter imposition of social norms resulted as these issues—and especially clandestine marriage—occupied a larger place in political, theological, social, and cultural debates of the time. Laetitia Dion’s book shows how these preoccupations drove the creation of new forms of French narrative fiction.

In this thorough study emanating from her doctoral thesis, Dion begins by establishing the context with a useful hundred-page overview of the history of marriage through the sixteenth century. Part 2 explains the choice of her principal corpus of thirteen texts, which stand out in the rich vein of narrative fiction of the first two-thirds of the century: Les Cent Nouvelles nouvelles (Philippe de Vigneulles, ca. 1515), L’Histoire de Palanus, comte de Lyon (anonymous, ca. 1511–20), Le Grand Parangon des nouvelles nouvelles (Nicolas de Troyes, ca. 1535), Les Angoisses douloureuses qui procèdent l’amour (Hélisenne de Crenne, 1538), Les Contes amoureuses par Madame Jeanne Flore (1542), Philandre (Jean Des Gouttes, 1544), Discours des champs faëz (Claude de Taillement, 1553), Les Comptes du Monde adventureux (A.D.S.D., 1555), Melicello (Jean Maugin, 1556), L’Amant resuscité de la mort d’amour (Nicolas Denisot, 1557), Nouvelles Récréations et Joyeux Devis (Bonaventure Des Périers, 1558), L’Heptaméron (Marguerite de Navarre, 1559), and, finally, Histoires tragiques (Pierre Boaistuau, 1559). These all make original contributions to the development of prose fiction thanks to their experimentation with themes surrounding marriage. The wedding night, adultery, and the ups and downs of married life—particularly that of mismatched couples—are motifs that recur, but it is the formation of the couple without parental consent that generates the most narrative tension in works published in the 1540s and 1550s—precisely the time when the church-state controversy on the subject was coming to a head. Where in earlier fiction clandestine marriage could result in a happy reconciliation with families, the later texts insist that only disaster can result from contesting social duty. Individual desire is repressed as these texts stage the triumph of social and political authority.

In part 3 Dion fleshes out her poetics of narrative fiction. Part 2 traces the evolution of the depiction of love outside marriage from foreign and French sources both comic (satirical, misogynistic) and serious (chivalric romance) toward the expression of individual sentiment using first-person narration. Increasingly these stories show the destructive power of amorous passion, a movement culminating in Boaistuau’s influential Histoires tragiques. Yet some works also champion romantic love, even if sentiment must remain secret or internalized in the face of social constraints. The notion that love (though perhaps not passion) and marriage can coexist is hinted at, but the ideal of companionate marriage is not yet present in the 1550s.

Short-form fiction lengthens as plot and character development become more complex, while nonfiction explorations of marriage multiply throughout the century. Specialists in early modern France of all disciplines will benefit from Laetitia Dion’s integration of many strands of analysis as her work opens a new chapter in the literary history of narrative fiction.