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Review Of Putting Asunder: A History Of Divorce In Western Society, Carl E. Schneider

Reviews

This ambitious, impressive, and absorbing book seeks to chronicle the history of divorce in Western society from the Middle Ages to the present. It begins by describing the ideological positions on divorce of the Catholic Church and of the Protestant reformers. From this description grows the book's first theme, the story of the development of divorce legislation. Phillips examines the insistence of Catholic states on marital indissolubility, traces the acceptance in Protestant states of divorce -primarily for adultery- and reviews the strikingly liberal law of revolutionary France. After noting that divorce law was procedurally and substantively secularized in the seventeenth …