Irregular marriage: myth and reality

This article examines the historiography, the law, and the practice of irregular marriage in Britain. It argues that there has been a confusion of terms in the historiography of irregular marriage that has served to obscure its meaning, pattern, and incidence. Using evidence from Scotland where irregular marriage continued to be legally valid until 1939 (with one form remaining legally valid until 2006), the article argues that despite its legally valid status, the interpretation of what constituted irregular marriage was extremely limited and that it served as a de facto or functional equivalent to civil marriage.<p></p> In the formal legal sense Scotland had stood virtually alone amongst Western European countries in enshrining simple exchange of consent as sufficient basis for marriage. However, in practice Scotland was very similar to other countries in what was regarded as acceptable forms of contracting marriage and the same stigma was attached to informal or irregular unions that we see elsewhere. However, as elsewhere, the majority of people conformed to the legal rules and the legal paradigms of marriage, but equally there was no neat correspondence between legal codes and social practice with ordinary people adopting a more flexible definition of marriage than the official one

Les couples clandestins devant la justice d'Eglise : réflexions sur la normalisation matrimoniale judiciaire dans la France du Nord-Ouest à la fin du Moyen Age

The purpose of this paper is to study how, why and to what ends men and women in Western France are summoned to appear by ecclesiastical judges in the Later Middle Ages for secret, irregular or so-called “clandestine” marriage. Some couples were brought before the court for a clandestine marriage, because of a lack of witnesses, banns, or certificates, or a lack of ceremony in facie ecclesie. They were sentenced to pay a pecuniary fine and, if consents had been proved, to solemnize their marriage afterwards. Some other people instituted proceedings in order to be recognized as the legal husband or wife of someone who wanted to marry someone else, or because they feared his or her partner might desert or their children might be considered as illegitimate. The lack of ceremony in many clandestine marriages could weaken matrimonial bounds. When the man and the woman did not question the reality of a marriage which was irregularly celebrated from the legal viewpoint, standing trial and being penalized could be a possible way to perfect afterwards matrimonial bounds which could have to be quickly contracted. The study of clandestine marriage involves considering many attitudes to the matrimonial norms (canonical, social) and their uses by the laity. Because of the variety of forms of this matrimonial infraction, one has to consider the variety of uses of justice by the laity: ecclesiastical judges condemned or putted in order; couples submitted or tried in a way to take advantages of legal proceedings

Clandestine Schemes: Burney\u27s \u3cem\u3eCecilia\u3c/em\u3e and the Marriage Act

This essay reads Frances Burney’s Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782) alongside the debates surrounding the 1753 Clandestine Marriages Act in order to show how the novel responds to and participates in one of the most divisive public controversies of the Enlightenment. In doing so, the essay challenges the view of Burney as a conservative defender of patriarchal culture, while highlighting the balances that she strikes between individual freedom and filial duty. The novel criticizes secret matches not only because they challenge the legitimate authority of parents and guardians, but also because they enable men to undermine women’s consent. Burney is keenly aware that parents and guardians sometimes abuse their authority, but she ultimately affords them considerable control over marriage: Cecilia suggests that all couples—even those over the age of majority—ought to obtain the approval of parents or guardians before they wed. While the novel imaginatively extends the reach of the Act, however, it offers a subtle critique of the patriarchal principle that underwrites this law. In Cecilia, Burney shows the dangers of turning marriage into an exchange between men. Shifting the locus of authority from Cecilia’s guardian and prospective father-in-law to her prospective mother-in-law, Burney highlights the importance of maternal as well as paternal consent. She also affirms Cecilia’s own agency in the negotiation of her union with Mortimer and even hints at Cecilia’s autonomy as a wife. In the bequest that Mrs. Delvile’s sister leaves Cecilia when she dies and the change that Mortimer undergoes after Cecilia’s illness, the novel offers a model of marriage as an affective agreement between two equal agents

The impact of the Clandestine Marriages Act: three case-studies in conformity

This article examines the extent of compliance with the Clandestine Marriages Act 1753 through three parish studies. It demonstrates that the vast majority of the sample cohort of parents whose children were baptized in church, and indeed of couples living together, had married in church as required by the 1753 Act, and shows how the proportion of marriages traced rises as more information about the parties becomes available. Through a study of settlement examinations, the article posits an explanation of why some marriages have not been traced, and argues that researchers should be cautious in inferring non-compliance from the absence of a record in a specific parish. It is also argued that the reason for such high rates of compliance has less to do with the power of statute and more to do with the fact that the 1753 Act was not such a radical break with the past as has been assumed

Opera Scenes Program, March 27, 1996

This is the concert program of the Opera Scenes Program performance on Wednesday, March 27, 1996 at 4:00 p.m., works performed were Quartet from Act III, Die Entführung aus dem Serail by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Trio from Act I, Il Matrimonio Segreto by Domenico Cimarosa, Presentation Scene from Act II, Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss, Maria's Aria, La Fille du Régiment by Gaetano Donizetti, and Sextet from Act II, Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Theresa M. Kelley, \u3ci\u3e Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture. \u3c/i\u3e A Review by James C. McKusick

Book review by James C. McKusick. Truly encyclopedic in scope, Clandestine Marriage traces the efflorescence of botanical discourse in the long Romantic period, from the foundation of the Linnaean system of classification in Systema Naturae (1735) through the first publication of Charles Darwin\u27s Origin of Species (1859). Kelley offers a comprehensive historical view of botany as a distinct nexus of interaction between literature and science, showing how the characteristic certainties of Enlightenment science broke down under the pressure of newly-discovered plant specimens from distant parts of the world, new ways of understanding the taxonomic relationships among various plant species, and new modes of presenting botanical information within the epistemic framework of the philosophy of science

Silent Star: The Forgotten Film Career of Margarita Fischer

Childhood fame, a clandestine marriage, national popularity, nude photos, premature retirement from the public eye, a spouse's early death--the progression of silent film star Margarita Fischer's career from 1911 to 1927 was as colorful as the plot of any of her pictures. The moviegoing public loved Fischer's work. A June 1914 Photoplfly poll named her America's most popular actress, and American Beauty Films selected Fischer's face as one of the nation's most beautiful and recognizable to serve as its logo the same year.1 Her final film, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1927), directed by husband Harry Pollard, was one of the most expensive and highly-hyped films then made by a major studio.

Word versus Honor: The Case of Françoise de Rohan vs. Jacques de Savoie

This paper examines one of the most notorious scandals of sixteenth-century France. In 1557, Françoise de Rohan, a lady-in-waiting to Catherine de Medici, launched a legal battle to get the duke of Nemours, Jacques de Savoie, to recognize their orally-agreed marriage contract and formally recognize the child whom he had fathered with her. Central to Rohan’s case were not only the love-letters Nemours had written to her but also the eye-witness testimonies of her servants, who had overheard their marriage vows and had witnessed their love-making. Nemours’s only defense was his word of honor as a gentleman that no marriage had taken place. This paper situates the case of Rohan vs. Nemours within a transitory period in French society as oral and literate cultures competed for precedence, and asks what happens to the concept of honor when the spoken word is no longer to be trusted