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After a long debate the Council of Trent decided against the validity of marriages contracted informally, without a public ceremony. Marriages without parental consent, however, remained valid. These decisions are frequently described as a pragmatic compromise, where one controversial reform was rejected in favor of another, equally controversial. Yet there was, as this article will show, a significant difference in how the delegates addressed the questions of publicity and parental consent. While the discussion of the former mostly concerned how (not if) a reform could be carried out, the discussion of the latter concerned the very principle of mandatory parental consent. The ensuing debate reflects the clash between two opposing views of marriage in sixteenth-century Europe: on the one hand, the couple-oriented, consensualist conception of classical canon law; and on the other, the family-oriented conception of both Protestant and Catholic reformers with its emphasis on order, stability, and parental authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historical–demographic heritage of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires' rule in Serbia created different models of collective and private life, which had particular influence on marriage patterns. Sremska Mitrovica and Šabac were subject to different marriage policies as jurisdictions separated by the Sava river with specific historical contexts, and together they represent the differences across the border between two empires, whose legacies have lasted until today. Data based on marriage registers from these areas were statistically analyzed by the SPSS software package. This article analyses these differences through data on discrepancies in crude marriage and divorce rates, the first marriage age, and the homogamy of marriages based on the spouses' geographical origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I. INTRODUCTION 558 II. THE 1987 REVISION TO THE LAW OF MARRIAGE 560 III. 2015 CHANGES TO SAME-SEX MARRIAGE 560 IV. GIFTS IN CONTEMPLATION OF MARRIAGE 564 V. MARITAL TORTS [...], This Article is the third in a series of primers on Louisiana Family Law. The Louisiana Civil Code of 1870, as amended to date, operates as the primary source of law, with other ancillary statutes and codes on particular subject matters. The law of marriage appears in Title IV of Book I of the Civil Code to prescribe the rules for marriage, nullity of marriage, and the incidents of marriage. The Civil Code Ancillaries, found in Title 9 of the Revised Statutes, further provide details governing marriage in Louisiana. The title on marriage outlines the prerequisites of marriage, actions for nullity of marriage, and the rights and obligations spouses enjoy as a result of the contract of marriage.

Throughout the early modern period, French law forbade unsanctioned marriages between minors, a crime classified as "seduction." Men who wed without the consent of their bride's parents earned the designation "seducers" and faced the potential of capital punishment. By the mid-eighteenth century, notorious seduction cases assumed outsize significance because of radical changes in legal culture. From the 1760s until the eve of the Revolution, defense lawyers wielded the legal brief as a powerful instrument of public opinion, criticizing parental control over marriage and championing free choice in its place. These men transformed seduction cases into referendums on paternal power--and, by extension, the power of the monarchy itself. While historians have long examined politically charged critiques of paternal power during this period, this article explores these critiques' unique implications for unwed women. It illustrates how celebrated lawyers mobilized language of Enlightenment to carve out discursive space in which young women exercised autonomy vis-à-vis their parents. Nevertheless, it also argues that these same legal discourses constrained female happiness to the realm of marriage to sooth anxieties about the threat that disobedient daughters posed to family, social, and gender order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous ancient texts present prescriptions on Christianity's ethic, liturgy, leadership, and other institutions. Scholars call 'church order literature' a few of them composed in Greek, because of literary dependencies among them that make them an identifiable corpus. The composition of some of them seems to begin in the first century. In the fourth century, Christians began to gather them in various collections. While all these texts and their collections have no common literary genre, they do all purport to convey a tradition of apostolic teaching on the conduct of church life and its institutions. This teaching sees God's law based on Christian scripture as the only valid law for church life. This article will present the prescriptions of that law conveyed by the ancient church order literature on the following topics: family requirements for membership in the church, prohibitions defining and defending marriage, regulations on family relationships, and restrictions on who may marry. Even in its dispositions on marriage and family, the ancient church order literature attests Christians' contact with multiple legal regimes in the Roman empire. This literature reflects a view of the ancient Christian family that is typical in its difference from, and its similarity to, Greco-Roman conceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classical and Hellenistic Greek laws and dowry practices were generally more progressive and provided more protections for wives than early Roman marriage law and practice. Roman dowry law then witnessed a series of significant developments over the course of the republic, beginning with the time when the Romans were coming into increased contact with Greek culture. Changes in social attitudes towards the conditions for women in marriage, their ability to control their dowries, and their right to own property, seem to have been responsible for these transformations in Roman family law. As Romans became increasingly Hellenized, their dowry and marriage practices in general came to resemble patterns prevailing in the Greek world, perhaps as a result of individuals' emulation of Greek laws and customs. The shift from the overall predominance of marriage in manu to marriage sine manu may therefore be explained partly by influences from the Greek world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many historians refer to the legal presumption of marital coercion when discussing patterns of lenient judicial treatment of women in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century English criminal trials, few have analyzed the presumption in enough detail to ascertain the impact it genuinely had. This article undertakes close legal analysis of marital coercion. It argues that the presumption was not frequently referred to in nineteenth-century Old Bailey criminal trials for receiving stolen goods because of increasing judicial strictness as to the application of the presumption. A defendant had to prove her marriage, her husband's presence at the crime scene, and, by the nineteenth century, evidence of her husband's actual control. The presumption may have shifted from an irrebuttable presumption to one rebuttable upon proof that any of these requirements were absent. Therefore, women's lenient court treatment during the modern period cannot be straightforwardly attributed to frequent successful recourse to marital coercion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An afterword is presented to this special issue on topics related to the history of marriage and marriage law.

Legal systems in late medieval Christendom – including church, state and Jewish systems – increasingly outlawed and penalised bigamy. In 1401, Venetian Crete’s highest court heard a civil suit in which a Jewish woman accused her husband of expelling her from their home and taking a second wife. Instead of punishing the bigamist, the court arbitrated a compromise mandating continued bigamy for this couple. Using this case to engage in a microhistory of Jewish marriage, bigamy and the Cretan context, this study explores why the Venetian court on Crete came to the decision to uphold and protect a Jewish right to bigamy. After addressing a legal accommodation for minority personal law made by Venice for its non-Latin Cretan subjects, it argues that competing social, religious and political values within Venetian and Jewish societies, alongside evolving attitudes towards normative coupling and marital relationships, facilitated this unexpected official permission for Jewish bigamous marriage. Throughout, the study evaluates both contemporary attitudes towards bigamy as an institution that affected men and women differently, and the Cretan secular legal realm as one in which male and female Jews, in their own ways and for their own reasons, could assert agency and shape the court’s understanding of Jewish law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented to this special issue on topics related to the history of marriage and marriage law.

This paper examines the relationship between law, medical knowledge and romantic suffering in early twentieth-century Australia. Drawing upon a sample of breach of promise of marriage actions from 1824 to 1930, it argues that where the plaintiff’s pain was largely presumed in the nineteenth century, by the twentieth century mastering the language and performance of anguish became crucial to legal success. The less that women suffered socially from romantic disappointment, the more they sought to prove it in court. Women dressed the lesions of their hearts in the disinterested language of medicine and borrowed psychological categories of trauma from victims of war and railway injuries. Heartbreak was thus legitimized as a species of pain by a convergence of law, medicine and women’s audacity to take their feelings seriously. The court’s response to these new bodily articulations of suffering provides a counter-history to the usual tale of law’s preference for the tangible over the intangible. Somatic injury was relegated to special damages, determined by the evidence of doctors and with less lucrative compensation, while emotional injury occupied the dominant, more profitable category of general damages. The history of heartbreak thus demonstrates the historical contingency of legal hostility to emotional injury. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article contributes to the recent wave of historical studies that have examined the immediate social transformations implied by slavery abolition on gender relations. It highlights slave women's attempts to alter their status and the personal agency they displayed in the immediate post-proclamation period in the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). During this very early period (1874-1877) women were quite an active presence in the colonial court and the percentage of cases discussing the right of women to leave their husbands increased. Traditional and colonial powers soon reacted to this changing situation. There were two main constraints to women's emancipation. On one hand there was a general confusion on the legal status of wives within traditional family, and on the other, the logic of debt concealed within the repayment of dowries tried to force women back into bondage even when they succeeded in changing their status from slaves to free women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IN THE FIRST VOLUME OF THEIR HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE, WHICH appeared in 1881, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage asserted that the married women's property [...]

Did Native people have the same rights as French people in the colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? They did, according to a law enacted in all the colonies. Indeed, once converted, aboriginal people could go and live in France, get married to French people, and inherit their wealth. However, the implementation of this law, which was specific to the French colonies, posed some problems. Marriages between French settlers and aboriginal women constituted a non-negligible loss of income for the colony. The law allowed an aboriginal widow to inherit the goods and wealth of her deceased husband. In these cases, the French judges, among other members of Louisiana's Conseil supérieur, were faced with the dilemma of either upholding the missionary vocation of the French colonies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--a vocation used to justify the colonization of the New World--or preventing the loss of part of the colony's wealth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines historiography on the legal status of 16th-century Lithuanian widows including the book "Provisions for Widowhood in the Legal Sources of Sixteenth Century Lithuania" by Jurgita Kunsmanaité. Lithuanian marriage law and patterns are scrutinized along with legal aspects of dowry gifts and the contractual aspects of marriage.

Rabbinic literature situates marital intimacy at the nexus of desire and disablement. While analysis of disability in Jewish thought has primarily focused on the limits that disability places on men's capacity to fulfill specific religious obligations, a feminist intersectional analysis of disability discourse in rabbinic marriage law illuminates the deeply gendered nature of disability. While notions of male disability focus particularly on the occupational stench of low-class work, rabbinic texts conceptualize women's disability in primarily visual terms. In the sensory anthropology of rabbinic desire, women are led by the nose--while men are drawn by the eye. This article uses Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theory of the queer closet to probe the charged, sexual dimensions of knowledge and ignorance at the heart of rabbinic marriage. Rabbinic law aims to protect the husband from the possibility that a blemished bride might pass, while simultaneously guarding against the immodest gaze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The right of persons to marry without coercion and live their marriage freely was one of the foremost and frequently mentioned topics among synod and council fathers, moralists, and canon lawyers in colonial Spanish America. Within the territory of the viceroyalty of Peru, the recommendations of the Council of Trent in this regard took the form of a new set of ecclesiastical regulations, derived from synods and councils that occurred from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scotland was unique in Western Europe in continuing to accord legal validity to irregular marriage until 1939 with one form of irregular marriage remaining legal until 2006. This article examines official attitudes to irregular marriage in Scotland in the period 1855–1939 as well as its incidence and popularity amongst the populace. The article argues that irregular marriage was narrowly defined by the authorities as meaning those irregular marriages that had been registered. Other forms of irregular marriage were often deemed to be cohabitation or concubinage which was regarded as morally reprehensible. However, authorities, including Poor Law officers, could also be flexible and sympathetic in their treatment of couples who lived together where the law was perceived to be rigid. Although it is impossible to quantify the numbers of couples who lived in non-registered informal unions, the evidence suggests that there were significant numbers but that in the majority of cases couples cohabited because they were unable to marry for legal, religious, or financial reasons. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The main objective of this article is to explore the institutionalization of cohabitation that occurred in Norwegian law in the period 1972–2010. From being (officially) illegal until 1972, cohabitation in its contemporary form has become majority practice, a child-rearing institution, as well as recognized in law in ways that blur the differences between cohabitation and marriage. Although cohabitation is common in many European countries, Norway is one of the few to have gone full circle. This article focuses on the changes in politicians’ ideas and norms regarding intimate relationships during this period. The empirical analysis is based on political documents and debates in the Norwegian parliament about cohabitation, marriage, single motherhood and the family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Politics, Aristotle maintains, contrary to his predecessors, that there is a distinctive mode of authority that husbands should exercise over their wives. He even coins a word for it: γαμιϰή, ‘the marital art’ or ‘marital rule’ (Pol. 1.3, 1253b8–10; 1.12, 1259a37–9). Marital rule is supposed to differ from the authority that fathers have over their children and from the kind of rule that citizens exercise over one another. Yet it is not clear whether there is any conceptual space between political and paternal rule for marital rule to occupy. Where fathers rule and children are ruled, citizens take turns ruling and being ruled. Husbands, however, either share their rule with their wives, or they do not. If they do not, then marital rule seems indistinct from paternal rule; if they do, then it seems indistinct from political rule. To add to the confusion, Aristotle says that husbands properly rule their wives politically, but without alternating in positions of ruling and being ruled. On its face, this idea seems flatly contradictory. Political rule just is shared, reciprocal rule, and so if the husband rules permanently and his wife is merely ruled, then his rule cannot be political. So Aristotle's own description of marital rule appears inconsistent, and in any case it is difficult to see how marital rule could have the distinctive character that he insists it does. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This Article shows that many Enlightenment liberals defended traditional family values and warned against the dangers of sexual libertinism and marital breakdown. While they rejected many traditional teachings in their construction of modern liberalism, Enlightenment liberals held firmly to classical and Christian teachings that exclusive and enduring monogamous marriages are the best way to ensure paternal certainty and joint parental investment in children who are bom vulnerable and dependent on their parents' mutual care. Stable marital households, furthermore, are the best way to ensure that men and women are treated with equal dignity and respect, and that husbands and wives, and parents and children, provide each other with mutual support, protection, and edification throughout their lifetimes. The positive law of the state must not only support the marital family but also outlaw polygamy, fornication, adultery, and "light divorce" that violate the other spouse's natural rights as well as desertion, abuse, neglect, and disinheritance that violate their children's natural rights to support, protection, and education from their parents. This argument about the natural norms and laws of sex, marriage, and family life, was adumbrated by Aristotle, elaborated by Thomas Aquinas, and then extended by scores of later theologians, philosophers, and jurists. Many of the great architects of Western liberalism embraced these traditional teachings and defended them with arguments from nature, reason, custom, fairness, prudence, utility, pragmatism, and common sense. Their arguments echoed loudly in sundry Anglo-American common law texts, statutes, and cases until the twentieth century, and they remain instructive even for our post-modern polities and families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The story of Mary Hylas offers a rare opportunity to examine a point of contact between metropolitan reformers and an Afro-Caribbean woman. Archival records related to the obscure case of Hylas v. Newton, heard in 1768, as well as the much more famous case of Somerset v. Stewart, heard in 1772, reveal how metropolitan reformers contended with slavery and marriage during the early years of political abolitionism in the British empire, and particularly how they attempted to contain their reforming rhetoric in order to condone marriage while condemning slavery. The records of Newton plantation, meanwhile, offer a window to the lived experiences of Mary Hylas. Life-long marriage was an unattainable and even undesirable ideal for many Afro-Caribbean women, Mary included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of the Roman tradition concerning marriage and divorce as well as current research on modern reconstructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report on a conference on the history of marriage and marriage courts, held at the University of Vienna, Austria, from September 10-11, 2014. Topics of discussion included the legal framework of marriage laws and civil law more broadly, databases for historical research on the subject, and legal arguments and strategies employed by spouses.

Engagement or promise of marriage has been known since ancient times and has always been interconnected with the institution of marriage. The New Civil Code introduced engagement among institutions of family law, motivated by the fact that "traditional social reality" in our country requires it. Legal acts of engagement have evolved over time, moving from contract rigors to a simple fact, which does not imply the fiances' obligation to marry one another. For a long period of time, engagement couldn't be found in legal regulations and it was recentely introduced in the legal area as an independent institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 2002 and 2003, Denmark introduced further limitations on its already restrictive regulations concerning family and marriage reunification. While several studies, both Danish and international, have discussed the effects of these and other family reunification laws on individual practice, we know very little about the their effects on people's self-perceptions and norms. Based on a qualitative data set, including a total of 89 interviews with young people of immigrant background living in Denmark collected between 1999 and 2009, this article seeks to provide answers to this and related questions. As a social technology, do the regulations create changes in the practice field of the respondents which they gradually come to see as natural and reasonable, or do they leave them in a troubling subject position (Staunæs, 2005) based on a socially and legislatively regulated stigma? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses legal aspects of civil marriage in Italy after the 19th century Unification, focusing on sexual impotence as grounds for marriage annulment. Topics discussed include the history of civil procedure for annulment of marriage on these grounds, research on annulment proceedings in the civil tribunal of Naples, Italy in the late 19th century, and the range of men and women involved in these cases.

The 1753 Marriage Act can be considered as a first step in the struggle of the rising middle classes in Britain to impose their norm of marriage on the rest […]

A law banning Roman soldiers from entering into legal marriage was decreed early in the first century A.D. However, many soldiers still had women who lived with them as wives. Children born of these marriages were not socially ostracized but could not legally inherit anything from their fathers.

Rate of non-marital unions was increased in the second half of the 20th century. Simultaneously, interest for traditional marriage was decreased. Church is trying to establish the dialogue with contemporary man in his modified intimacy and social practice. It's obvious there is a necessity to reassess Church's attitude toward non-marital unions as insufficiently canonically and theologically deliberated experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A case study is presented concerning a marriage contract arranged by procurators of Castile-León king Alfonso X and Béarne viscount Gaston VII during the late 13th century and its impact on the kingdom of Catile-León. The article examines the motivation for the arranged marriage, the legal foundation of the marriage contract, and why Alfonso X's son, Infante Sancho, violated the contract. It discusses the diplomatic relationship between Alfonso X and Gaston VII, and the law of Castile-León.

This article examines the historiography, the law, and the practice of irregular marriage in Britain. It argues that there has been a confusion of terms in the historiography of irregular marriage that has served to obscure its meaning, pattern, and incidence. Using evidence from Scotland where irregular marriage continued to be legally valid until 1939 (with one form remaining legally valid until 2006), the article argues that despite its legally valid status, the interpretation of what constituted irregular marriage was extremely limited and that it served as a de facto or functional equivalent to civil marriage.In the formal legal sense Scotland had stood virtually alone amongst Western European countries in enshrining simple exchange of consent as sufficient basis for marriage. However, in practice Scotland was very similar to other countries in what was regarded as acceptable forms of contracting marriage and the same stigma was attached to informal or irregular unions that we see elsewhere. However, as elsewhere, the majority of people conformed to the legal rules and the legal paradigms of marriage, but equally there was no neat correspondence between legal codes and social practice with ordinary people adopting a more flexible definition of marriage than the official one. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the study of female impotence during the Middle Ages. The author comments on the medical and legal aspects of impotence and describes the physical medical examination process at the time. She also considers the importance that was placed on marital sexual relations, citing marriage laws from the period, and the negative impact that female impotence had on marriage. The relationship between medicine and religion during the Middle Ages is explored and medieval surgical procedures attempting to correct impotence are also examined.

As evidenced by laws addressing abandonment of the home and children, family preservation was paramount for early twentieth-century Latin American nation builders. The judicial record of abandonment cases from Guatemala demonstrates how men attempted to enforce their authority in the home and then enlisted state officials to uphold it when their wives or daughters defied them. Yet, abandonment litigation often liberated women. By condoning female flight as a response to domestic abuse, judges emancipated women with the very laws intended to corral them. The same gendered institutions that buttressed patriarchies also provided women with the tools to challenge men's perceived right to intimidate and beat women. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Queen and the Triumvir took their place upon a dais. The Queen wore a long gown of gold tissue that made her figure look even more slim and supple. A stomacher of magnificent gems encased her breasts. Upon her head was the double diadem of Upper and Lower Egypt, encircled by the sacred uraeus.... The Queen rose, took up a fan and tenderly fanned her Consort. Then, with the ancient golden spatula which through the centuries was used to anoint the Kings of Egypt, she anointed Mark Antony on the head and the hands and mouth—the head that thinks of great deeds, the hands that accomplish them and the mouth that utters wise words. After this, the Egyptian Ministers and the High Priest advanced, and prostrating themselves before their Queen and her King-Consort, they kissed the ground and their feet. The High Priest placed a crown upon the brows of the Sovereigns, and the scribes drew up the papyrus enscribed with the hieroglyphics that would fix for ever the names of the wedded pair and declare the twins Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene legitimate as a result of the marriage. 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]