Aristocratic Marriage Adultery And Divorce In The Fourteenth Century

The life of "that notorious woman", Lucy de Thweng, is used as a prism through which to consider the agency of aristocratic women in the Middle Ages. The Yorkshire heiress, Lucy de Thweng, was married as a child to her first husband but later divorced him, entered into an adulterous relationship with another man, was forced into marriage to a second husband, and then, after a period of widowhood, married for the third time to a congenial partner of her own choice. This sounds a remarkable and unusual story - but was it? This book uses the episodes of Lucy's life to explore how far she was exceptional in her time and rank and highlights aspects of personality and personal relationships which are not often recognized. It undertakes extensive investigations into divorce in contemporary aristocratic families and extra-marital sexual relationships by women, as well as discussing the marriage of heiresses and the pressures to remarry which widows endured. These show that the theoretical religious and secular restraints on marriage and sex were often ignored, by both men and women, and how women, particularly if they were heiresses, were able to make their own decisions in these matters. As the legitimate procreation of children within the licensed environment of marriage was the forum for the succession to landed estates, the book also considers how this behaviour affected those estates. BRIDGET WELLS-FURBY is an independent scholar whose interests lie chiefly in late medieval landed estates and their context.

The fruits of new research on the politics, society and culture of England in the fourteenth century.

"The Pursuit of the Heiress" is a new, greatly enlarged and more widely focused version of what the late Lawrence Stone described as "a brilliant long essay or short book on the subject of the role of heiresses among the Irish aristocracy," which was published by the Ulster Historical Foundation under the same title in 1982 and has long been out of print. The new book comes to the same broad conclusions about heiresses--namely that their importance as a means of enlarging the estates or retrieving the fortunes of their husbands has been much exaggerated. This was because known heiresses were well protected by a variety of legal devices and, in common with many aristocratic women of the day, also had minds and strong preferences of their own--which meant that they were not generally an object of deliberate or profitable pursuit. The new book also ranges more widely than its central theme of heiresses and addresses other aspects of aristocratic marriage such as abductions, elopements, mesalliances, the supposed "rise of the affective family," and the disadvantaged situation of even the richest and most privileged women in an age when both adultery and divorce were largely the prerogative of men.

Getting divorced and remarried are now common practices in European societies, even if the rules differ from one country to the next. Civil marriage law still echoes religious marriage law, which for centuries determined which persons could enter into marriage with each other and how validly contracted marriages could be ended. Religions and denominations also had different regulations regarding whether a divorce only ended marital obligations or also permitted remarriage during the lifetime of the divorced spouse. This book deals with predominantly handwritten documents of divorce proceedings from the British Isles to Western, Central, and Southeastern Europe, and from 1600 to the 1930s. The praxeological analysis reveals the arguments and strategies put forward to obtain or prevent divorce, as well as the social and, above all, economic conditions and arrangements connected with divorce. The contributions break new ground by combining previously often separate fields of research and regions of investigation. It makes clear that the gender order doesn’t always run along religious lines, as was too often assumed. This book will be of interest to all scholars and students of economic, social, religious, cultural, legal, and gender history as well as gender and well-being in a broader sense.

A surprising look at how medieval etiquette can improve our lives today, from the author of the popular How to Live Like a Monk Medieval people are often portrayed as having poor hygiene and table manners—licking their knives or throwing chicken bones on the floor. In the Middle Ages, however, such behavior was not tolerated. Medieval society cherished order in nearly every facet of life, from regular handwashing to daily prayer. There were consequences if you didn’t adhere to the rules of good behavior: you wouldn’t be invited to the lord’s next dinner, you wouldn’t win the battle, and you wouldn’t win the lady. Author Daniele Cybulskie explores the world of medieval etiquette, encompassing table manners and interpersonal relationships as well as running a household and ruling a kingdom. With wit and insight, Cybulskie draws on a wide variety of primary sources, from handbooks for young knights to romantic poems. Though we may no longer need best practices for things like dueling or ordering about our servants, the principles of generosity, kindness, and respect still apply today. After all, it’s a good reminder to “not talk when you have food in your mouth” and “anything you say should be entertaining, polite, and sophisticated.” Illustrated with original drawings by Anna Lobanova as well as eighty medieval artworks, Chivalry and Courtesy is full of good advice for everyone, whether you are a peasant or a knight, a student or a CEO, a king or a queen.

An indispensable guide to how marriage acquired the status of a sacrament. This book analyzes in detail how medieval theologians explained the place of matrimony in the church and her law, and how the bitter debates of the sixteenth century elevated the doctrine to a dogma of the Catholic faith.

In 1807 Napoleon Bonaparte created the Duchy of Warsaw from the Polish lands that had been ceded to France by Prussia. His Civil Code was enforced in the new Duchy too and, unlike the Catholic Church, it allowed the dissolution of marriage by divorce. This book sheds new light on the application of Napoleonic divorce regulations in the Polish lands between 1808-1852. Unlike what has been argued so far, this book demonstrates that divorces were happening frequently in 19th century Poland and even with the same rate as in France. In addition to the analysis of the Napoleonic divorce law, the reader is provided with a fully comprehensive description of parties as well as courts and officials involved in divorce proceedings, their course and the grounds for divorce.

Advice on sex and marriage in the literature of antiquity and the middle ages typically stressed the negative: from stereotypes of nagging wives and cheating husbands to nightmarish visions of women empowered through marriage. Satiric Advice on Women and Marriage brings together the leading scholars of this fascinating body of literature. Their essays examine a variety of ancient and early medieval writers' cautionary and often eccentric marital satire beginning with Plautus in the third century B.C.E. through Chaucer (the only non-Latin author studied). The volume demonstrates the continuity in the Latin tradition which taps into the fear of marriage and intimacy shared by ancient ascetics (Lucretius), satirists (Juvenal), comic novelists (Apuleius), and by subsequent Christian writers starting with Tertullian and Jerome, who freely used these ancient sources for their own purposes, including propaganda for recruiting a celibate clergy and the promotion of detachment and asceticism as Christian ideals. Warren S. Smith is Professor of Classical Languages at the University of New Mexico.