Spouses, Church, and State: Marriage Law in England and Protestant Germany from the Reformation until the Close of the Nineteenth Century

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Saskia Lettmaier
• Subject Area: Private Law
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 534368766

Legal history is the story of legal change over time, and it is the task of the legal historian to illuminate and explain that change. Hence, periods and areas of striking legal development (or of a striking absence of such development) tend to attract the legal historian’s attention. This book explores what is arguably the greatest transformation to have occurred within the Western law of marriage in the last five hundred years: the shift from a unified marital order, legislated and adjudicated by a universal church and influenced by theological principles, to a non-unified marital order, legislated and adjudicated by separate and sovereign nation-states and influenced by secular principles – in particular the individualistic tenet that it is best for everyone concerned that a marriage that at least one partner has emotionally outgrown should be freely dissoluble. In eight chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion, I analyze how and why this great shift occurred and why it occurred differently in different territories. Through the lens of the experiences of England and Protestant Germany (with a particular focus on Prussia), I connect the narrow legal changes to larger sociopolitical and intellectual transformations. This allows me to explain not only the legal changes themselves, but also the national peculiarities of development. The book focuses on three seminal moments in the history of Western marriage on its way from an ecclesiastical to a secular entity: the sixteenth-century Reformation, the mid-seventeenth to the eighteenth century, and the nineteenth century. The second period gets by far the most attention. This emphasis reflects my conviction that the mid-seventeenth to eighteenth centuries were the true watershed period, which brought the intellectual foundation and, in Prussia, also the practical implementation of a new – institutionally and substantively largely secular – model of marriage. I thus take issue with a strain of scholarship that posits that the Reformation was the key secularizing influence. Although my book is situated in the history of mariage law, its findings and conclusions are also relevant for the broader issue of what forces play a role in the evolution of the law. Today, few would doubt the proposition that there are social and ideological “causes” for legal development. However, what these causes are and in what combination they have to be present for a legal change to occur are questions that are rarely examined in any detail.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants