This book features two legal historians at the top of their game bringing their expertise about various English court systems to bear on the topic of marital separation and divorce. They set out to explain why England was the lone Protestant country in the Atlantic world that did not sanction divorce with remarriage after the Reformation. Their answer involves England’s common-law custom of coverture and its “uncommon way of dealing with marital property,” as reflected in early modern England’s secular courts, which have been neglected by those studying marital separations and divorce (2). The authors effectively show that these courts also had jurisdiction in broken marriages, especially when issues of marital property and spousal maintenance were concerned. Kesselring and Stretton clearly make their case (enlivened by legal anecdotes) in chapters focusing on changing attitudes toward divorce and emerging options for separated spouses.
A chapter about “secular separations” reveals how an...