The authors of this book describe and analyse various forms of contracting marriage in Central and South-Eastern Europe during the XlXth and early XXth century. Some peoples are viewed within modern State boundaries.

The book consists of an Introduction and eight chapters each dedicated to the people (or peoples) of some European country: the Poles, the Sorbs, the peoples of Czechoslovakia and of Yugoslavia, the Bulgarians, the Roumanians, the Albanians, and the Greeks, a common principle of description being observed in all the chapters facilitating the comparison of the material.

The authors point out the dependence of marriage contracting forms and attendant usages on the level of socio-economic relations development. Such phenomena, as participation of the community in contracting of a marriage union of its members, quasi-kinship, age-gender associations, the choice of the marriage partner based on principles of social and local endogamy, survived to a variable extent with the peoples of Central and South-Eastern Europe.

As a rule, match-making and engagement preceded the wedding. Though a great variability of the forms of these acts exists in different countries and with different peoples, their meaning is common: the choice of the marriage partner has been accomplished and this fact is subject to broad announcement, as well as an agreement on material provisions for the future marriage union is meant to have been achieved. Marriages without match-making and «marriages by abduction» were more rare.

The wedding ceremony is the central element of the whole wedding cycle, by which the marriage union was sanctified and legalized through three kinds of procedure: traditional custom, church wedding and civil registration. Though these procedures occured with the peoples under study in different combinations, celebration of a wedding according to custom remained the most essential element.

Post-wedding ceremonies fixed the new social status of the newlyweds, the adoption of a new member into the community, as well as the mutual ties between the two affined families and even larger groups.

It is stressed in the book that the wedding complex is multilinear and polyfunctional. The authors describe actions, symbols, verbal formulae, that take their origins at different epochs and reflect the social, legal, moral, ethical, and religious views of the people of those times.

The ethno-cultural peculiarities of the peoples under study are revealed through popular applied fine arts and musical folklore (e. g. popular dance and song).

The following tendency of the development of the wedding ritual is shown in the book: though traditional actions and symbols were preserved, their functional meaning was undergoing change.