Main description:

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.

Contents:

1.Introduction. 2.Women and Work. Part I - Divorce from Bed and Board. 3.Separated Beds - Interwoven Property: Separation and Divorce in the Habsburg Monarchy between the mid-16th and the mid-19th Century. 4.Separating Persons and Property in Early Modern English Marriages. 5.Divorce in Early Modern Bilbao. 6.Judicial Separation and its Material Effects in France during the 16th and 17th Centuries. 7.Interwoven Ecclesiastical and Civil Divorce Trials: A Venetian Case Study (1785). 8.Divorce during the Concordat at the Marriage Courts of Prague and Trent (1857-1868). 9.Material Matters: Dissolution of Economic Ties in the Context of Divorces in Rural Lower Austria in the 1920s and 1930s. Part II - Divorce with Dissolution of the Marriage. 10.Enduring Animosity: Negotiating Post-separation Conflicts in the German County of Lippe (17th and 18th Century). 11.The Indistinct Line between Marriage and Divorce: Ambiguous Nature of the Marital Status in the 17th Century Ottoman Empire. 12.The Influence of Islamic Law on Greek Orthodox Divorce under Ottoman Rule. 13.The Economy of Islamic Divorce in Habsburg Bosnia and Herzegovina (1878-1918). 14.New Possibilities - New Practices? Divorces of Jewish Couples under the Purview of the Austrian Civil Code in the 19th Century: Provisions, Agreements, and Property Issues.