Frederik Pedersen is Senior Lecturer in the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, UK. He is the author of Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (2000) and Viking Empires (2005; with Angelo Forte and Richard Oram). He is also the editor of Ships, Guns and Bibles in the North Sea and Baltic States, c.1350-c.1700 (2000; with Allan Macinnes and Thomas Riis).

Intimate details about the personal lives of medieval people are frustratingly rare. We seldom know what the men and women of the middle ages thought about marriage, let alone about sex. The records of the church courts of the province of York, mainly dating from the fourteenth century, provides a welcome light on private, family life and on individual reactions to it. They include a wide range of fascinating cases involving disputes about the validity of marriage, consent, sex, marital violence, impotence and property disputes. They also show how widely the laws of marriage were both known and accepted. Marriage Disputes in Medieval England offers a remarkable insight into personal life in the middle ages.