Divorce in Medieval England

Divorce in Medieval England PDF Author: Sara Margaret Butler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415825164
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Divorce, as we think of it today, is usually considered to be a modern invention. This book challenges that viewpoint, documenting the many and varied uses of divorce in the medieval period and highlighting the fact that couples regularly divorced on the grounds of spousal incompatibility.

Divorce in Medieval England

Divorce in Medieval England PDF Author: Sara Margaret Butler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415825164
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Get Book Here

Book Description
Divorce, as we think of it today, is usually considered to be a modern invention. This book challenges that viewpoint, documenting the many and varied uses of divorce in the medieval period and highlighting the fact that couples regularly divorced on the grounds of spousal incompatibility.

Divorce in Medieval England

Divorce in Medieval England PDF Author: Sara M. Butler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135950938
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Divorce in Medieval England is intended to reorient scholarly perceptions concerning divorce in the medieval period. Divorce, as we think of it today, is usually considered to be a modern invention. This book challenges that viewpoint, documenting the many and varied uses of divorce in the medieval period and highlighting the fact that couples regularly divorced on the grounds of spousal incompatibility. Because the medieval church was determined to uphold the sacrament of marriage whenever possible, divorce in the medieval period was a much more complicated process than it is today. Thus, this book steps readers through the process of divorce, including: grounds for divorce, the fundamentals of the process, the risks involved, financial implications for wives who were legally disabled thanks to the rules of coverture, the custody and support of children, and finally, what happens after a divorce. Readers will gain a much greater appreciation of marriage and women’s position in later medieval England.

Marriage in Medieval England

Marriage in Medieval England PDF Author: Conor McCarthy
Publisher: Boydell Press
ISBN: 9781843831020
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
A survey of attitudes to marriage as represented in medieval legal and literary texts.

Marriage Litigation in Medieval England

Marriage Litigation in Medieval England PDF Author: Helmholz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521035620
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This book tells one part of the long history of the institution of marriage. Questions concerning the formation and annulment of marriage came under the exclusive jurisdiction of the church courts during the Middle Ages. Drawing on unpublished records of these courts, Professor Helmholz describes the practical side of matrimonial jurisdiction and relates it to his outline of the formal law of marriage. He investigates the nature of the cases heard, the procedure used, the people involved and changes over the period covered, all of which add to what is known about marriage and legal practice in medieval England. The concluding assessment of canonical jurisdiction over marriage suggests that the application of the law was more successful than is usually thought.

Aristocratic Marriage, Adultery and Divorce in the Fourteenth Century

Aristocratic Marriage, Adultery and Divorce in the Fourteenth Century PDF Author: Bridget Wells-Furby
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
The life of "that notorious woman", Lucy de Thweng, is used as a prism through which to consider the agency of aristocratic women in the Middle Ages. The Yorkshire heiress, Lucy de Thweng, was married as a child to her first husband but later divorced him, entered into an adulterous relationship with another man, was forced into marriage to a second husband, and then, after a period of widowhood, married for the third time to a congenial partner of her own choice. This sounds a remarkable and unusual story - but was it? This book uses the episodes of Lucy's life to explore how far she was exceptional in her time and rank and highlights aspects of personality and personal relationships which are not often recognized. It undertakes extensive investigations into divorce in contemporary aristocratic families and extra-marital sexual relationships by women, as well as discussing the marriage of heiresses and the pressures to remarry which widows endured. These show that the theoretical religious and secular restraints on marriage and sex were often ignored, by both men and women, and how women, particularly if they were heiresses, were able to make their own decisions in these matters. As the legitimate procreation of children within the licensed environment of marriage was the forum for the succession to landed estates, the book also considers how this behaviour affected those estates. BRIDGET WELLS-FURBY is an independent scholar whose interests lie chiefly in late medieval landed estates and their context.

Marriage, Separation, and Divorce in England, 1500-1700

Marriage, Separation, and Divorce in England, 1500-1700 PDF Author: K. J. Kesselring
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192666959
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
England is well known as the only Protestant state not to introduce divorce in the sixteenth-century Reformation. Only at the end of the seventeenth century did divorce by private act of parliament become available for a select few men and only in 1857 did the Divorce Act and its creation of judicial divorces extend the possibility more broadly. Aspects of the history of divorce are well known from studies which typically privilege the records of the church courts that claimed a monopoly on marriage. But why did England alone of all Protestant jurisdictions not allow divorce with remarriage in the era of the Reformation, and how did people in failed marriages cope with this absence? One part of the answer to the first question, Kesselring and Stretton argue, and a factor that shaped people's responses to the second, lay in another distinctive aspect of English law: its common-law formulation of coverture, the umbrella term for married women's legal status and property rights. The bonds of marriage stayed tightly tied in post-Reformation England in part because marriage was as much about wealth as it was about salvation or sexuality, and English society had deeply invested in a system that subordinated a wife's identity and property to those of the man she married. To understand this dimension of divorce's history, this study looks beyond the church courts to the records of other judicial bodies, the secular courts of common law and equity, to bring fresh perspective to a history that remains relevant today.

Married Women and the Law

Married Women and the Law PDF Author: Tim Stretton
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773590145
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Explaining the curious legal doctrine of "coverture," William Blackstone famously declared that "by marriage, husband and wife are one person at law." This "covering" of a wife's legal identity by her husband meant that the greatest subordination of women to men developed within marriage. In England and its colonies, generations of judges, legislators, and husbands invoked coverture to limit married women's rights and property, but there was no monolithic concept of coverture and their justifications shifted to fit changing times: Were husband and wife lord and subject? Master and servant? Guardian and ward? Or one person at law? The essays in Married Women and the Law offer new insights into the legal effects of marriage for women from medieval to modern times. Focusing on the years prior to the passage of the Divorce Acts and Married Women's Property Acts in the late nineteenth century, contributors examine a variety of jurisdictions in the common law world, from civil courts to ecclesiastical and criminal courts. By bringing together studies of several common law jurisdictions over a span of centuries, they show how similar legal rules persisted and developed in different environments. This volume reveals not only legal changes and the women who creatively used or subverted coverture, but also astonishing continuities. Accessibly written and coherently presented, Married Women and the Law is an important look at the persistence of one of the longest lived ideas in British legal history. Contributors include Sara M. Butler (Loyola), Marisha Caswell (Queen’s), Mary Beth Combs (Fordham), Angela Fernandez (Toronto), Margaret Hunt (Amherst), Kim Kippen (Toronto), Natasha Korda (Wesleyan), Lindsay Moore (Boston), Barbara J. Todd (Toronto), and Danaya C. Wright (Florida).

Medieval Women

Medieval Women PDF Author: Henrietta Leyser
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 1780226535
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Henrietta Leyser considers the problems and attitudes fundamental to every woman of the time: medieval views on sex, marriage and motherhood; the world of work and the experience of widowhood for peasant, townswoman and aristocrat. The intellectual and spiritual worlds of medieval women are also explored. MEDIEVAL WOMEN celebrates the diversity and vitality of English women's lives in the Middle Ages.

She Wolves

She Wolves PDF Author: Elizabeth Norton
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0752469215
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
She Wolves is a history of the 'bad girls' of England's medieval royal dynasties - the queens who earned themselves the reputation of being somehow notorious. Some of them are well known and have been the subject of biographies - Eleanor of Aquitaine, Emma of Normandy, Isabella of France and Anne Boleyn, for example - while others have not been written about outside academic journals. The appeal of these notorious queens, apart from their shared taste for witchcraft, murder, adultery and incest, is that, because they were notorious, they attracted a great deal of attention during their lifetimes. She Wolves reveals much about the role of the medieval queen and the evolution of the role that led, ultimately, to the reign of Elizabeth I, and a new concept of queenship.

Women in Medieval History and Historiography

Women in Medieval History and Historiography PDF Author: Susan Mosher Stuard
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 151280729X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
What was the status of women in the Middle Ages? How have women fared in the hands of historians? And, what is the current state of research about women in the Middle Ages? Susan Mosher Stuard addresses these questions in a collection of essays that delve in to the history and historiography of women in medieval England, France, Italy, and Germany. Contributors include Barbara Hanawalt, Diane Owen Hughes, Suzanne Wemple, Denise Kaiser, and Martha Howell. One of the most interesting observations made in Women in Medieval History and Historiography is the way in which the history of women in each country has followed a distinct course that is in rhythm with other concerns of national historical writing. Women in Medieval History and Historiography will interest historians, scholars of women's studies, and medievalists.