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

K. J. Kesselring and Tim Stretton

• Puts the question of why England, of all Protestant jurisdictions, did not adopt full divorce in the sixteenth-century Reformation in the context of another distinctive aspect of English history: the common law formulation of coverture, marriage's legal consequences for wives
• Examines what people in failed marriages did in the absence of full divorce, highlighting the private, secular separations they arranged for themselves and how these arrangements helped spur the rise of alimony
• Re-examines the history of divorce and marital separations in the wake of the Reformation by turning to records of secular courts, rather than the usual focus on the church courts, and looks across a range of lay courts, including Chancery, Requests, and Star Chamber
• Focuses on the two centuries after the Reformation up to the allowance of parliamentary divorce at the end of the seventeenth century
• Engages with the 1640s and 1650s, decades often ignored in works that focus on church courts (given the abolition of those courts in the civil war years), thus bringing to light previously little-known changes to the provision of alimony
• Selects influential precedents from the reported case law and examines them in the fuller detail afforded by the records of litigation, offering accounts of a range of fascinating real-life stories

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

K. J. Kesselring and Tim Stretton

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

K. J. Kesselring and Tim Stretton

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

K. J. Kesselring and Tim Stretton

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