Marriage and Violence

Frances E. Dolan is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. Among her books are Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700 and Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture.

"[Frances E. Dolan] steeped herself in the history [of marriage], brought along a philosopher's antennae for blunt contradiction, and produced Marriage and Violence. Oh, how the quality of debate on same-sex marriage would improve if activists on the subject, candidates, and officials sat down to read it! Maybe it can be tossed out, like a bouquet, anywhere such players meet."-Chronicle Review "A sophisticated, erudite discussion of the tensions between egalitarian and hierarchical principles in the Anglo-American ideal of marriage. Dolan provocatively argues that these tensions illustrate important continuities between seventeenth- and twenty-first-century marital models and have created recurring dilemmas in our theory and practice of marriage."-Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage "Why does marriage so often lead to violence? In her timely and important new book, Frances Dolan identifies the culprit: an 'economy of scarcity' that modern marriage inherits from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Powerfully argued and wonderfully well documented, Marriage and Violence provides a rare example of how historical scholarship can illuminate the present."-Richard Helgerson "Marriage and Violence is an original, timely, and compelling study of the impact of early modern English discourses about marriage on contemporary understandings of marital violence. Arguing that when marriage explodes into violence we can see the past haunting the present, Dolan both presents a radically new history of marriage and provides us with some new conceptual tools for rethinking present marital ideologies."-Valerie Traub, University of Michigan "In this brilliant analysis of the contradictory but persistent model of marriage that continues to haunt modern versions of the institution ... Dolan supports her wide-ranging and provocative claims with scholarship that is impressively comprehensive and meticulously detailed... A book of value not only to historians but also to twenty-first-century individuals interested in rethinking the institution of marriage and the gender dynamics within it."-Citation for Honorable Mention in the 2009 Society for the Study of Early Modern Women Book Award competition "Frances Dolan's marvellously polemical book explores the conceptual underpinnings of marriage... Her bracing attack on the structure of marriage is intended to provoke debate in order to find new ways of thinking about the marital relationship. It will surely do that and, in a world which sees the persistence of marital violence every day in its most brutal form, such questioning is to be applauded."-English Historical Review "Well researched and based on a rigorous, prolonged comparison between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritan advice literature and late twentieth-century American evangelical books of marital counsel... The book is a splendid read."-Journal for the Study of Marriage and Spirituality

• IntroductionChapter One. One Flesh, Two Heads: Debating the Biblical Blueprint for Marriage in the Seventeenth and Twentieth Centuries.Chapter Two. Battered Women, Petty Traitors, and the Legacy of CovertureChapter Three. Fighting for the Breeches, Sharing the Rod: Spouses, Servants, and the Struggle for EqualityChapter Four. How a Maiden Keeps Her Head: Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I, and the Perils of MarriageAfterwordNotesIndexAcknowledgments