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 Drawing on unpublished records of these courts, Professor Helmholz describes the practical side of matrimonial jurisdiction and relates it to his outline of the formal law of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.

This is an in-depth, richly documented study of the sex and marriage business in ecclesiastical courts of Elizabethan and early Stuart England. This study is based on records of the courts in Wiltshire, Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire and West Sussex in the period 1570-1640.

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

This book uses a wide range of primary sources - legal, literary and demographic - to provide a radical reassessment of eighteenth-century marriage. It disproves the widespread assumption that couples married simply by exchanging consent, demonstrating that such exchanges were regarded merely as contracts to marry and that marriage in church was almost universal outside London. It shows how the Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 was primarily intended to prevent clergymen operating out of London's Fleet prison from conducting marriages, and that it was successful in so doing. It also refutes the idea that the 1753 Act was harsh or strictly interpreted, illustrating the courts' pragmatic approach. Finally, it establishes that only a few non-Anglicans married according to their own rites before the Act; while afterwards most - save the exempted Quakers and Jews - similarly married in church. In short, eighteenth-century couples complied with whatever the law required for a valid marriage.

1896. The Child in Primitive Culture. Contents: Child-Study; The Child's Tribute to the Mother; The Child's Tribute to the Father; The Name Child; The Child in the Primitive Laboratory; The Bright Side of Child-Life: Parental Affection; Childhood the Golden Age; Children's Food; Children's Souls; Children's Flowers, Plants, and Trees; Children's Animals, Birds, etc.; Child-Life and Education in General; The Child as Member and Builder of Society; The Child as Linguist; The Child as Actor and Inventor; The Child as Poet and Musician; The Child as Teacher and Wiseacre; The Child as Judge; The Child as Oracle-Keeper and Oracle-Interpreter; The Child as Weather-Maker; The Child as Healer and Physician; The Child as Shaman and Priest; The Child as Hero, Adventurer, etc.; The Child as Fetich and Divinity; The Child as God: The Christ-Child; Proverbs, Sayings, etc., about Parents, Father and Mother; Proverbs, Sayings, etc., about the Child, Mankind, Genius; Proverbs, Sayings, etc., about Mother and Child; Proverbs, Sayings, etc., about Father and Child; Proverbs, Sayings, etc., about Childhood, Youth, and Age; and Proverbs, Sayings, etc., about the Child and Childhood.

While marriages were supposed to be celebrated publicly by priests, in churches where the parties were known, many couples had reasons - among them parental disapproval, religious nonconformity, property considerations and previous entanglements - to marry in other ways. Clandestine marriage had represented a problem to the church and state, and to the rights of property, since the middle ages, eluding a variety of attempts to control it. By the eighteenth century it had become a scandal, with Fleet parsons marrying thousands of couples a year. In 1753 Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act nullified such irregular marriages, only to drive couples to seek other forms of privacy down to, and beyond, the introduction of civil marriage in 1836. In this intriguing book Brian Outhwaite explores the nature and scale of clandestine marriage. He describes why it attracted so many customers and why it was so hard to suppress.

This book is the first major study of courtship in early modern England. Courtship was a vitally important process in early modern England. It was a period of private and public negotiation, often fraught with anxiety. If completed successfully it brought respectability, the privileges of marriage and adulthood, and a stable union between socially, economically, and emotionally compatible couples. Using Kent church court and probate material dating from the 15th to the end of the 16th century, the book blends historical and anthropological perspectives to suggest novel and exciting approaches to the making of marriage.

An original theory asserts that this distinctive form of kinship system developed in the northern Mediterranean around the fourth century A.D., and that its subsequent growth can be attributed to the efforts of the early Christian Church to acquire property formerly held by domestic groups.