Code: 04290216

English Marriage

Name: English Marriage
Brand: John Murray Press
SKU: 04290216
Price: 12.93 EUR
Availability: BackOrder

by Maureen Waller

Language: English
Binding: Paperback
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: John Murray Press, 2010
More about this

12.93 €

RRP: 15.78 €

You save 2.85 €

Availability:

50/50

We think title might be available. Upon your order we will do our best to get it within 6 weeks.
We search the world

Availability alert

Add to wishlist

Project 1 Third Edition: Student's Book
72.17 €
Buy
Unmentionables
16.57 € -4 %
Buy
Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis
53.37 €
Buy
Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642
30.93 € -23 %
Buy
Boats of the World
674.92 €
Buy
Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara
19.30 € -23 %
Buy
Research and Global Perspectives in Learning Disabilities
192.08 €
Buy

Give this book as a present today

Order book and choose Gift Order.
We will send you book gift voucher at once. You can give it out to anyone.
Book will be send to donee, nothing more to care about.

Book gift voucher sample Read more

Availability alert

We will watch availability for you

Enter your e-mail address and once book will be available,
we will send you a message. It's that simple.

You get 32 loyalty points

Book synopsis

The story of the English marriage is unique and eccentric. Long after the rest of Europe and neighbouring Scotland had reformed their marriage laws, England clung to the chaotic and contradictory laws of the medieval Church, making it all too easy to enter into a marriage but virtually impossible to end an unhappy one. If England was a 'paradise for wives' it could only have been through the feistiness of the women. Married women were placed in the same legal category as lunatics. While Englishmen prided themselves on their devotion to liberty, their wives were no freer than slaves. It was a husband's jealously guarded right to beat his wife, as long as the stick was no bigger than his thumb. Only after 1882 could a married woman even retain her own property. But then marriage was all about property in a society which was both mercenary and violent, where a girl was virtually sold into marriage and a price was put on a wife's chastity. With a cast of hundreds, from loyal and devoted wives in troubled times to those who featured in notorious trials for adultery, from abusive husbands whose excesses were only gradually curbed by the law to the modern phenomenon of the toxic wife, acclaimed historian Maureen Waller draws on intimate letters, diaries, court documents and advice books to trace the evolution of the English marriage. It is social history at its most revealing, astonishing and entertaining.