History Commons^™

The Several Faces Of Late-Gothic Eve: Gender And Marriage In The Mystery Creation And Fall Plays, Thomas Flanigan

Quidditas

The critical drive to make fundamental, substantive distinctions between Catholic and Protestant dogma and culture has always been central to early modern English studies, but over the past fifty years a prominent contingent of literary and historical scholars has endeavored more specifically to identify and articulate significant differences between Catholic and Protestant perceptions of women and marriage. According to one familiar, now widely accepted theory advanced primarily by Miltonists, a relatively feminist and pro-marriage Protestant ethic emerged in response to the extreme, aggressively misogynistic attitudes attributed to late-medieval Catholic thought. This paper will seek to demonstrate, through a close comparative …

“Mutual Comfort”: Courtly Love And Companionate Marriage In The Poetry Of Sir Philip Sidney And Edmund Spenser, Amanda Taylor

Quidditas

The interaction between courtly love poetry and the development of companionate marriage has received little critical attention. Rather, critics of courtly love poetry focus on authorial ambition and self-presentation. This paper explores how the revision of the courtly love genre in the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser participated within the societal transformation toward companionate marriage. The individualized female characters in their poetry shatter courtly stereotypes, but the relationship options presented either fragment the sequence, as in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, or enable it to drive forward to completion, as in Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion. I …

Books Recommended For Courses: Denis De Rougement. Love In The Western World, J. M. Anderson

Quidditas

Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World has become something of a classic since it first appeared in 1939. Rougemont traces the development of romantic love from its origins in the twelfth century to its mutated condition in the twentieth. His thesis is that romantic love and marriage are fundamentally opposed. “My central purpose,” he wrote in his Preface to the 1956 revised edition, “was to describe the inescapable conflict in the West between passion and marriage; and in my view that remains the true subject, the real contention of the book as it has worked out.” Whereas romantic …

Fame And The Making Of Marriage In Northwest England, 1560-1640, Jennifer Mcnabb

Quidditas

Because England did not enact a comprehensive reform of its medieval marital law until Lord Hardwicke’s Act in 1753, it was possible to construct a binding marriage outside the authority of the Church of England during the Tudor and Stuart periods. Marriages created by the exchange of present-tense consent, even if they failed to follow the church’s suggested rules concerning time and place, its emphasis on clerical presence, and its stress on publicity (through three readings of the banns or the procurement of a marriage license), were considered spiritually legitimate throughout the eight decades prior to the civil wars. An …

Interpreting Early Modern Woman Abuse: The Case Of Anne Dormer, Mary O'Connor

Quidditas

[T]hese hard laws I live under must keepe us from seeing one another.

Anne Dormer

When Anne Dormer, of Rousham, Oxfordshire, wrote to her sister, Elizabeth Trumbull, in August 1686, she complained that she would not be able to greet her on her return from a tumultuous year in France. Elizabeth (sometimes called Katherine) was married to the special envoy William Trumbull and had just endured the events of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Anne’s husband, Robert Dormer, had certain “laws” under which his wife had to live, one of which prohibited her from going to London to …

Review Essay: Sheehan, Michael M. Csb. Marriage, Family, And Law In Medieval Europe. Collected Studies, Albrecht Classen

Quidditas

Sheehan, Michael M. CSB. Marriage, Family, and Law in Medieval Europe. Collected Studies. Ed. James K. Farge. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1996. xxxi + 330 pp. $45.00.

Review Essay: Alan Macfarlane, Marriage And Love In England, Modes Of Reproduction, 1300-1840, J. B. Owens

Quidditas

Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England, Modes of Reproduction, 1300-1840, Basil Blackwell, 1986.

Matrimony And Change In Webster's The Duchess Of Malfi, Margaret L. Mikesell

Quidditas

Profound changes occurred in the institution of marriage during the Renaissance. Love was gradually replacing fiscal and dynastic considerations as the foundation considered crucial for a binding union. The love marriage was largely a middle-class phenomenon, born of the changing relationship between the family and the state, articulated and refined by Protestant divines, and diffused through aristocratic society. Drama of the period is much concerned with this shift. The bourgeois conjunction of love and marriage triumphs in the aristocratic societies of many a romantic comedy. The weddings at play's end promise a new social order. The disintegration of the old …