Jonathan Seelye Martin, By Consent Alone: Marriage Law and German Romance 1186-1210. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2025, xi, 260 pp.

Although the author engages with Middle High German romances that have already been discussed almost ad nauseam, he manages quite successfully to engage with two aspects contained in them that deserve further investigations, both the question regarding consent as the basis of any good marriage and the right to divorce around 1200. Martin completed his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 2018 with a study of the same topic, so the book appears to be based on his doctoral thesis, though he does not specifically inform us about this detail, except pointing out that he had worked on this topic already since 2012.