This chapter explores how enslaved people developed legal know-how about Castilian laws of slavery and freedom, and shared and exchanged such information with others. In particular, the chapter focuses on the history of enslaved Black people’s determination to raise capital or credit to purchase their liberty from their enslavers. The chapter explores how enslaved Black men and women often plotted their paths to liberty through economic decisions by focusing on the lives of enslaved Black people who resided in the towns along the Camino Real in New Spain between Veracruz and Mexico City during a time of economic boom in the late sixteenth century. Notarial records that cataloged the self-purchase and liberation of enslaved people in port towns of the Spanish Atlantic often reveal how enslaved Black people developed social ties and capital among kin, friends, and charitable residents, and consorted with people from varied socioeconomic backgrounds who lived or passed through the places where they resided. These records index a history of conversations about strategies to obtain liberty among enslaved Black people and relationships across different socioeconomic spheres that allowed for some enslaved people to access precious credit to pay for their liberty.

Two differing ideas characterized the city of Toronto throughout the twentieth century. The first, Toronto the Good, represented the aspirations of religious leaders, reformers, politicians, and police officers to create a city modelled after Christian morality. Sexuality was meant to be expressed in the confines of the private, monogamous, heteronormative family home. Sex was for procreation, not pleasure. Contrary to Toronto the Good was a second idea, Toronto the Gay, a 1950s tabloid reference to the variety of spaces available for sexual exploration and desire. Sex work, queer sex, interracial marriage, divorce, birth control, and abortion endured despite intense enforcement of sexual morality. This chapter explores the tensions between the idealism of Toronto the Good and the sexual opportunities of Toronto the Gay.

This chapter explores London as a site of sexual pleasure and danger in the nineteenth century, a period during which as an imperial centre it became the world’s largest city. Focused on the complex sexual landscape of this urban environment, it examines sexual activity in both private and public spaces including homes, theatres, public houses, pleasure gardens, royal parks, and toilets, paying particularly attention to the ways in which social class determined the personal experiences of sexuality in the Victorian era. Many of these acts were frequently monitored and policed and could result not only in moral censure but also in arrest, imprisonment, or public humiliation in places such as divorce courts. Most likely to run afoul of the law were those in the British metropolis who transgressed gender and sexual boundaries by working as prostitutes, cross-dressing, or engaging in intimate acts with members of their own sex. The sexual history of nineteenth-century London also involved the proliferation of a thriving and diversified trade in pornographic texts and images, ranging from erotic novels to photographic postcards. Central to this chapter are considerations of the ways in which sex and sexuality figured in economic life, urban geographic configurations, and various forms of self-fashioning.

The sexual culture of eighteenth-century Philadelphia was relatively open, particularly when compared with other North American colonial cities. This was due in part to its diverse, multi-national and multi-racial population and traditions, as well as to a steady stream of new ideas. During this period perceptions about gender, sexuality, and marriage were evolving, influenced by new scientific theories, Enlightenment thought, and republican ideology, disseminated by its changing population and the availability of printed sources. In addition, many laws changed as the colony became a state, and within the city new prisons and almshouses were built. Nevertheless, rape, as now, was seldom reported or prosecuted, and especially in the nineteenth century Black women and women considered ‘unrespectable’ were often blamed for enticing men. During the eighteenth century men and women easily moved in and out of relationships, sexual relationships outside marriage were frequently tolerated, and women had some sexual freedom. Prostitution was not confined to one section of the city; neither were the births of illegitimate children. Women could obtain abortifacients, and erotic literature was widely read. However, by the nineteenth century such behaviour was increasingly considered deviant, and Philadelphia was a much less tolerant place.

This chapter explores the representation of marriage in Robert Lowell’s poetry. It considers the often-controversial relationship between his biography and the published poems, and further explores how he uses marital dynamics to interrogate knowledge of self and other. At various times throughout his career, Lowell examines the social and domestic structures provided by marriage, representing the institution as a space of stability and emotional intensity, and therefore one that both inspires and supports creative achievement. Lowell’s third union, with Caroline Blackwood, intensified his engagement with the subject of marriage, prompting deeper analysis of states of intimacy and endurance in this final phase of his writing life. This chapter begins with Lowell’s late work, in particular with the volume Day by Day (1977), but argues that his preoccupation with marriage can be traced back through The Dolphin (1973) to the confessional mode of the era-defining Life Studies (1959) and to its radical approach to tone and form that, at that time, enabled Lowell to interrogate the vexed relationship between private and public histories in profound ways.

This chapter concerns Lowell’s years in England and Ireland, his divorce from Elizabeth Hardwick, and third marriage to Lady Caroline Blackwood. It focuses on the controversy around the publication of The Dolphin (1973), which deals with these matters and damaged his reputation. It also concerns Lowell’s state of mind, his health, and his interaction with British university life and British poetry, although these were of less pressing concern to him than his relationships and his fierce commitment to his own poetry. The chapter begins with Lowell as a temporarily jaded public figure leaving America to take creative respite in England. During his time here, he reworks his Notebook to produce History and For Lizzie and Harriet, while newer sonnets appear in The Dolphin. Despite the more warmly received Day by Day (1977), the chaos in his marriage leads him to return to America and Hardwick, where he dies at age sixty.

The 1959 Iraqi Personal Status Code was controversial at enactment, and it remains so to this day. Some of the controversy relates to its progressive elements, which include a ban on child marriage, expanded child custody rights granted to mothers, and limitations on polygamy. Another significant dimension to the controversy, less remarked upon in scholarly and media circles, concerns the extent to which the Iraqi state should have the power to legislate at all with respect to personal status matters, and instead to defer to traditional religious authorities for rulemaking. This chapter highlights some of the key rules of the Personal Status Code, its evolution over time, its treatment in the courts, and the controversies that continue to surround it. The chapter shows that in many ways, the challenges facing the Personal Status Code reflect the cleavages that have posed an existential threat to Iraq since its creation.

Suits related to freedpeople’s marriages – the linchpin of familial legitimacy – put the disabilities of the slave past, rather than newly granted rights, at the center of discussions about freedom and abolition. In each, a domestic conflict exposed the need to consider the previous actions and intentions of freedpeople, and prompted an assessment of how the established laws and customs of domesticity could be applied to those formerly excluded from their protection. Rather than exposing the ways that race and former status determined whether freedpeople were entitled to equal rights, this chapter considers whether former status prevented some rights – including the most fundamental among them – from being enjoyed at all.

The Council of Trent defended matrimony as a sacrament, reaffirming traditional Catholic teachings, butalso putting an end to future clandestinemarriages by imposing conditions for the marriage contract to be valid, assuring the free consent of the spouses, making it public, bringing the rite under the control of the clergy, and keeping an official record of the ceremony. It forbade divorce while not condemning the practices of the Orthodox.

The formulas not only tell us about how people in the formulas’ world understood family relationships, but also sometimes reveal hints of how they felt about them. The formulas focus above all on the nuclear family. A good number of them deal with inheritance, in a variety of permutations that reveal tension as well as concord within families. Others deal with different kinds of property arrangements among members of families, including people who had been adopted into families. Still others highlight the needs and emotions that could drive family behavior. A number of formulas deal with those who had lost their families, namely orphans. The formulas dealing with family matters have a great deal to say about the lives of lay women in this world. Women appear not simply as passive objects in the arrangements reached by their male relatives and husbands, but as active agents who participated fully in the documentary culture around them. Some of the formulas that involve them also reveal that while the dominant norms disadvantaged women in the inheritance of property, those norms could be and frequently were breached in practice, even when they were framed in terms of law.

In his theory of the family, Pufendorf treats it as a complex society composed of three simple societies or associations: those between husband and wife (matrimony), parents and children (paternal society), and master and servant, or slave (societas herilis), which are united under the domestic rule of the paterfamilias, or head of the family. Given that Pufendorf holds all human beings – women no less than men – to be naturally equal in virtue of their humanity, that is, the common moral status that they acquire through their subjection to the law of nature, the question arises as to how he justifies authority in the private realm of the family: how does his patriarchal account of marriage, and his justification of servitude, or slavery, fit with the egalitarian premise of his natural law theory? In focusing on the role of pacts and consent in the founding of the various modes of domination within the family, the chapter highlights Pufendorf’s critical attitude to traditional justifications of authority, but also indicates the limits of the egalitarian premise of his natural law theory. The chapter ends with a comparison between the rule of the head of the family and supreme sovereignty in the state.