Today a divorce made headlines.
Although 20,000 or more Puritans emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony from England between 1629 and 1640, it wasn’t until this day in 1643 that colony courts granted the first divorce (to Anne Clark, whose husband Denis had abandoned her and their children and started another family). This was notable for two reasons: first, Puritan legal practices followed English Common Law, which means that Anne had lost her civil identity and become attached to her husband when they’d married (here in the US, women wouldn’t get the rights of men, like voting, until almost 300 years later). So it was notable that she got the divorce in the first place. Second, it was notable that she got the divorce in the first place: Over ten years of life in the colony and no couples called it quits before her? It’s all but assured that it happened all the time, only without the endorsements of regulation or blessings of religion.
Marriages used to start out that way, too. The ancient Romans could pretty much decide they were married and then renounce the deals at will, and this practice was more the norm than the exception through much of the Middle Ages…so much so that the Catholic Council of Trent felt compelled to decree in 1563 that marriages should happen before a priest and include at least two witnesses. The procedures of Puritan divorce were as much a protest to such official rules (like the convoluted gymnastics of annulment, which allowed for divorce only if you could imagine the marriage having never happened). Similarly, religions and societies around the world have forever grappled inconsistently and often cruelly with the subject.
Like many enduring social conventions, however, has marriage most often ended — or survived — based on the will of the participants and not the edict of rule-makers?
