This splendid and original study, by the leading English historian
of family life, maps out the changing moral views of our ancestors
over the past four centuries towards marriage and divorce. The
text, largely based on court records, is full of entertaining human
vignettes. (Kirkus UK)
Lawrence Stone is one of the world's foremost historians. In such
widely acclaimed volumes as The Crisis of the Aristocracy, The
Family, Sex and Marriage in England and The Open Society, he has
shown himself to be a provocative and engaging writer as well as a
master chronicler of English family life. Now, with Road to
Divorce, Stone examines the complex ways in which English men and
women have used, twisted, and defied the law to deal with marital
breakdown.
Despite the infamous divorce of Henry VIII in 1529, Britons before
the 20th century were predominantly, in Stone's words, "a
non-divorcing and non-separating society." In fact, before divorce
was legalized in 1857, England was the only Protestant country with
virtually no avenue for divorce on the grounds of adultery,
desertion, or cruelty. Yet marriages did fail, and in Road to
Divorce, Stone examines a goldmine of court records--in which
witnesses speak freely about love, sex, adultery, and
marriage--memoirs, correspondence, and popular imaginative works to
reveal how lawyers and the laity coped with marital discord.
Equally important, in tracing the history of divorce, Stone has
discovered a way to recapture the slow, irregular, and tentative
evolution of moral values concerning relations between the sexes as
well as the consequent shift from concepts of patriarchy to those
of sexual equality. He thus offers a privileged, indeed almost
unique, insight into the interaction of the public spheres of
morality, religion, and the law.
Written by the foremost historian of family life, Road to Divorce
provides the first full study of a topic rich in historical
interest and contemporary importance, one that offers astonishingly
frank and intimate insights into our ancestors' changing views
about what makes and breaks a marriage.
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