Broken Lives Separation and Divorce in England, 1660-1857

Name: Broken Lives Separation and Divorce in England, 1660-1857
Price: 8.08 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9780198202547

ISBN-10: 0198202547

ISBN-13: 9780198202547

Edition: 1993

Authors: Lawrence Stone

List price: $165.00

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Lawrence Stone's trilogy on marriage in early modern England has been widely praised. The New York Times Book Review hailed the first volume, Road to Divorce as "sure-footed and fascinating commentary" and chose it as a Notable Book of 1990. Christopher Hibbert in the Independent found that the "absorbing and often extraordinary" stories in volume two, Uncertain Unions "throw a clear, bright light not only upon the making and breaking of marriages in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, but also on social customs and the intimacies of private lives." Now, in Broken Lives, the third and final book, Stone sets out to examine the various ways people ended marriages and the lengths to which… they would go to do so. Drawing from a massive archive of court cases, Stone presents stories that paint a revealing portrait of divorce in the period before 1857. Divorce could only be obtained by Act of Parliament, and often at great expense and with much difficulty. As Stone writes, however extreme the circumstances, the legal breaking of a marriage on the grounds of cruelty was not easy to obtain in seventeenth-century England. For instance, in Boteler v. Boteler, Anne Boteler, wife of Sir Oliver Boteler, had overwhelming evidence of her husband's abuse (which included death threats and physical attacks on Anne and her children). Yet even though Sir Oliver's own relatives testified against him, it took Anne three years to obtain a legal separation. Of course, in some instances, the wife had the upperhand. In Lovedon v. Lovedon, we see an instance in which a wife could repeatedly appeal her husband's suit for divorce at his expense. By law, Edward Lovedon was obliged to pay all of his wife Anne's bills until they were officially divorced. And in Beaufort v. Beaufort we learn that women would often successfully countersue their husbands for divorce on the grounds of impotence--in those days, it was more than likely that a man would fail the public test he underwent to prove his virility. Other cases reveal intriguing and often spiteful aspects of marital breakdown: servants blackmailing their adulterous masters and mistresses; and husbands suing their wives' lovers for property damage (i.e. to the wives' bodies). One of the world's leading authorities on the history of the family, Lawrence Stone has mapped the arduous routes which people took to break marriages--from private separation agreements to Parliamentary ruling. And as he does so, he provides a fascinating glimpse into daily life and marital conduct, and allows us to eavesdrop on the testimony and conversations of men and women of all sorts and conditions--from the serving girl to the served--in the changing social world of early modern England.

Book details

List price: $165.00
Copyright year: 1993
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Publication date: 8/26/1993
Binding: Hardcover
Pages: 388
Size: 6.50" wide x 9.75" long x 1.25" tall
Weight: 1.738
Language: English

Stone teaches history at Princeton University. With his semi-Marxist perspective, he examines class relationships and ambitions as explanatory factors in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English history.



List of Plates


List of Figures


List of Genealogies


Abbreviations


Introduction



Purpose, Structure, and Evidence



The Courts and the Law



Separation and Divorce in a Pre-Modern Society



The Methods of Making a Marriage



The Methods of Breaking a Marriage



Desertion and Elopement



Wife-Sale



Separation by Private Deed



Judicial Separation from Bed and Board



Crim. Con. Litigation



Parliamentary Divorce



Marriage and Property



Marriage and Moral Values



Case-Studies



Boteler v. Boteler: The battered wife, 1656-1675



Blood v. Blood: Separation for cruelty, 1686-1704



Calvert v. Calvert: Multiple adultery and bigamy, 1698-1710



Turst v. Turst: Marital cruelty and the wife's separate estate, 1725-1738



Dineley v. Dineley: Cruelty, adultery, and murder, 1717-1741



Beaufort v. Beaufort : The impotent duke and the adulterous duchess, 1729-1742



Grafton v. Grafton: Private separation and public divorce, 1756-1769



From Marriage to Private Separation, 1756-1765



From Adulteries to Divorce, 1765-1769



The Last Years, 1769-1811



Conclusion



Middleton v. Middleton: The lady and the groom, 1781-1796



The Background, 1781-1791



Trouble, 1791-1792



The First Crisis, November-December 1792



The Second Crisis, February-March 1793



The Final Crisis, March-April 1793



The Litigation, 1793-1796



Conclusion



Loveden v. Loveden: The lady and the don, 1794-1811



Cadogan v. Cadogan: The lady and the parson, 1777-1794



Otway v. Otway: Private and public separation, 1790-1811



Westmeath v. Westmeath: The wars between the Westmeaths, 1812-1857



The Failure of the Marriage, 1812-1818



The Causes of the Failure



The Struggle over Child Custody, 1819-1825



Litigation in the Secular Courts, 1820-1831



Litigation in the Ecclesiastical Courts, 1821-1834



The Financial and Psychological Consequences



Conclusion


Index