Chapter 2 - Nearly Headless Husbands

Summary

Milton's divorce tracts create a political ideology of marriage and husbands which increasingly sees wives as the problem for male citizens. Like Habermas in creating a fantasy of the public sphere that excludes women, and like Charles I in Eikon Basilike, Milton in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Tetrachordon, Colasterion, and Martin Bucer tracts imagines a hapless husband who needs to be freed from both paternal oversight and wifely constraints if he is to be a public authority in England. Inviting Parliament to see divorce itself as not just an analogy for anti-monarchy movements but as itself a key linchpin in the new commonwealth, Milton, in the divorce tracts, creates the perfect male citizen as the man who can repudiate his wife.