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‘An Action Like a Stratagem’ Courtship and Marriage from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Linda Pollock
Linda Pollock
Affiliation:
Churchill Collage, Cambridge
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Type
Review Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , June 1987 , pp. 483 - 498
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

1 The age of first marriage for women as well as the proportion of the population not marrying decreased in the eighteenth century, contributing markedly to the population rise of this century. Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R., The population history of England 1541–1871: a reconstruction (London, 1981)Google Scholar.

2 Edward Shorter, The making of the modern family has posited the existence of two sexual revolutions, one at the end of the eighteenth century and the other in the mid-twentieth century. For a criticism of this viewpoint see Scott, J. and Tilly, L., ‘Women's work and the family in nineteenth-century Europe’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, XVII (1975), 36–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8 For an alternative view, claiming that the elite were not attempting to reform the populace, see Ingram, M., ‘The reform of popular culture? Sex and marriage in early modern England’, in Reay, B. (ed.), Popular culture in seventeenth-century England (London, 1985), pp. 129–65Google Scholar. See also Stedman-Jones, G., ‘Class expression versus social control? A critique of recent trends in the social history of leisure’, in Languages of class. Studies in English worktng-class history (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 76–89Google Scholar, in which he warns that historians who study popular recreation as a distinct subject are in danger of ‘overpoliticizing leisure as an arena of struggle’.

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11 See, for example, Cannadine, D., ‘The context, performance and meaning of ritual: the British monarchy and the “invention of tradition”, c. 1820–1977’, in Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. (eds.), The invention of tradition (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 101–64Google Scholar.

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14 Ibid. p. 36.

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28 Cited in Wrightson, K., English society 1580–1680 (London, 1982), p. 76Google Scholar.

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36 The reluctance of parents to have too large a family has been well documented by historians: McLaren, A., Reproductive rituals: the perception of fertility in England from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (London and New York, 1984)Google Scholar; Macfarlane, A., The family life of Ralph Josselin. An exercise in historical anthropology (Cambridge, 1970)Google Scholar; Pollock, L., Forgotten children: parent-child relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar; Trumbach, R., The rise of the egalitarian family. Aristocratic kinship and domestic relations in eighteenth-century England (London and New York, 1978)Google Scholar.

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46 Lummis, Occupation and society

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50 The relationship between the heir and his younger brother/s is vital for the understanding of power relations in the political terrain of the upper classes in early modern society. See, for example, the use made of George Wentworth by his elder brother Thomas, Earl of Strafford, StrafTord letters, Sheffield Central Library, especially vols. 20–2.

51 G. Elton, review of Ozment, S. in New York Review of Books, 14 06 1984Google Scholar.