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

法律的历史是法律的变迁的历史，阐明和解释这种变迁是法律的历史学家的任务。因此，法律的显著发展的时期和地区（或这种发展显著缺失的时期和地区）往往会吸引法律的史学家的注意。本书探讨了在过去500年里，西方婚姻法发生的最大转变：从一个统一的婚姻秩序，由一个普遍的教会立法和裁决，并受神学原则的影响，到一个非统一的婚姻秩序的转变，由独立的主权民族国家立法和裁决，并受世俗原则的影响，特别是个人主义的原则，即对有关的每个人来说，最好是一个婚姻，至少一方的感情已经超越了应该自由解除。在八章加上引言和结论中，我分析了这一巨大转变是如何发生的，为什么会发生，以及为什么在不同的地区会发生不同的变化。通过英国和新教德国（特别关注普鲁士）的经验的透镜，我将狭义的法律的变化与更大的社会政治和思想变革联系起来。这使我不仅可以解释法律的变化本身，而且可以解释发展的国家特点。这本书聚焦于西方婚姻从教会走向世俗的三个重要历史时刻：16-世纪宗教改革、17 - 18世纪中期和19世纪。第二阶段是最受关注的阶段。这种强调反映了我的信念，即17世纪中期到18世纪是真正的分水岭时期，这一时期为普鲁士带来了一种新的婚姻模式的思想基础，也带来了这种新的婚姻模式的实际实施，这种婚姻模式在制度上和实质上都是世俗的。因此，我不同意一种学术观点，即认为宗教改革是世俗化的关键影响。虽然我的书是在婚姻法的历史，其发现和结论也相关的更广泛的问题是什么力量在法律的演变中发挥作用。今天，很少有人会怀疑法律的发展有社会和意识形态“原因”这一命题。然而，这些原因是什么，以及它们必须以什么样的组合出现才能发生法律的变化，这些问题很少得到详细的研究。

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.