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

法律历史是法律随着时间的推移而变化的故事，法律历史学家的任务是阐明和解释这种变化。因此，法律发展显著的时期和领域(或明显没有法律发展的时期和领域)往往会引起法律历史学家的注意。这本书探讨了西方婚姻法在过去500年中发生的可以说是最大的变革：从统一的婚姻秩序，由一个普遍的教会立法和裁决，并受到神学原则的影响，转变为不统一的婚姻秩序，由独立的主权民族国家立法和裁决，并受到世俗原则的影响--特别是个人主义原则，即对每个关心婚姻的人最好的原则是，至少一方在情感上已经超过了年龄，应该自由地解除婚姻。在八个章节中，加上引言和结论，我分析了这种巨大转变是如何发生的，为什么发生了，以及为什么它在不同的地区发生了不同的情况。通过英国和新教德国(特别关注普鲁士)的经历，我将狭隘的法律变革与更大的社会政治和智力变革联系在一起。这让我不仅可以解释法律变化本身，还可以解释发展的国家特殊性。这本书聚焦于西方婚姻历史上从教会到世俗实体的三个开创性时刻：16世纪的宗教改革，17世纪中期到18世纪，以及19世纪。到目前为止，第二阶段得到了最多的关注。这种强调反映了我的信念，即十七世纪中叶至十八世纪是真正的分水岭时期，它带来了知识基础，在普鲁士，也带来了一种新的--在制度上和实质上基本上是世俗的--婚姻模式的实际实施。因此，我对一种学术派别提出异议，认为宗教改革是关键的世俗化影响。虽然我的书讲述的是婚姻法的历史，但它的发现和结论也与更广泛的问题相关，即什么力量在婚姻法的演变中发挥了作用。今天，几乎没有人会怀疑这一命题，即法律发展是有社会和意识形态“原因”的。然而，这些原因是什么，以及它们必须以什么组合出现才能发生法律变化，这些问题很少被详细研究。

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.