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.

How was the law used to control sex in Tudor England? What were the differences between secular and religious practice? This major study, based on a wide range of church and secular court archives, explores sexual regulation in London and provincial England before, during and immediately after the Reformation.

England is well known as the only Protestant state not to introduce divorce in the sixteenth-century Reformation. Only at the end of the seventeenth century did divorce by private act of parliament become available for a select few men and only in 1857 did the Divorce Act and its creation of judicial divorces extend the possibility more broadly. Aspects of the history of divorce are well known from studies which typically privilege the records of the church courts that claimed a monopoly on marriage. But why did England alone of all Protestant jurisdictions not allow divorce with remarriage in the era of the Reformation, and how did people in failed marriages cope with this absence? One part of the answer to the first question, Kesselring and Stretton argue, and a factor that shaped people's responses to the second, lay in another distinctive aspect of English law: its common-law formulation of coverture, the umbrella term for married women's legal status and property rights. The bonds of marriage stayed tightly tied in post-Reformation England in part because marriage was as much about wealth as it was about salvation or sexuality, and English society had deeply invested in a system that subordinated a wife's identity and property to those of the man she married. To understand this dimension of divorce's history, this study looks beyond the church courts to the records of other judicial bodies, the secular courts of common law and equity, to bring fresh perspective to a history that remains relevant today.

Amussen's vivid account of family and village life in England from the reign of Elizabeth I to the accession of the Hanoverian monarchies describes the domestic economy of the rich and the poor; the processes of courtship, marriage, and marital breakdown; and the structure of power within the family and in rural communities.

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 text provides an assessment of the most important research published in the past three decades on the English family.

Brought together as a tribute to the distinguished Tudor historian C.S.L. Davies, the essays in this collection address key themes in the current historiography of the Tudor period. These include the nature, causes and consequences of change in English government, society and religion, the relationship of centre, localities and peripheral areas in the Tudor state, the regulation of belief and conduct, and the dynamics of England's relations with her neighbours. The contributors, colleagues and students of Cliff Davies, are all leading scholars who have provided fresh and interesting essays reflecting the wide ranging inquisitiveness characteristic of his own work. They seek to cross as he has done the traditional boundaries between the medieval and early modern periods and between social, political and religious history. A coherent collection in their own right, these essays, by showing the many new directions open to those studying the Tudor period, provide a fitting tribute to such an influential scholar.