Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of contributors
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Patrick Collinson
- 1 Nicolas Pithou: experience, conscience and history in the French civil wars
- 2 Elizabethan players and minstrels and the legislation of 1572 against retainers and vagabonds
- 3 Cleanliness and godliness in early modern England
- 4 Blood is their argument: men of war and soldiers in Shakespeare and others
- 5 Pragmatic readers: knowledge transactions and scholarly services in late Elizabethan England
- 6 The gardens of Sir Nicholas and Sir Francis Bacon: an enigma resolved and a mind explored
- 7 The Protestant idea of marriage in early modern England
- 8 James VI and I: furnishing the churches in his two kingdoms
- 9 A British patriarchy? Ecclesiastical imperialism under the early Stuarts
- 10 The Anglo-Scottish Union 1603–1643: a success?
- 11 Popery, purity and Providence: deciphering the New England experiment
- 12 Provincial preaching on the eve of the Civil War: some West Riding fast sermons
- 13 Popular form, Puritan content? Two Puritan appropriations of the murder pamphlet from mid-seventeenth-century London
- 14 The two ‘National Churches’ of 1691 and 1829
- Bibliography of the published writings of Patrick Collinson, 1957–1992
- Index
7 - The Protestant idea of marriage in early modern England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of contributors
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Patrick Collinson
- 1 Nicolas Pithou: experience, conscience and history in the French civil wars
- 2 Elizabethan players and minstrels and the legislation of 1572 against retainers and vagabonds
- 3 Cleanliness and godliness in early modern England
- 4 Blood is their argument: men of war and soldiers in Shakespeare and others
- 5 Pragmatic readers: knowledge transactions and scholarly services in late Elizabethan England
- 6 The gardens of Sir Nicholas and Sir Francis Bacon: an enigma resolved and a mind explored
- 7 The Protestant idea of marriage in early modern England
- 8 James VI and I: furnishing the churches in his two kingdoms
- 9 A British patriarchy? Ecclesiastical imperialism under the early Stuarts
- 10 The Anglo-Scottish Union 1603–1643: a success?
- 11 Popery, purity and Providence: deciphering the New England experiment
- 12 Provincial preaching on the eve of the Civil War: some West Riding fast sermons
- 13 Popular form, Puritan content? Two Puritan appropriations of the murder pamphlet from mid-seventeenth-century London
- 14 The two ‘National Churches’ of 1691 and 1829
- Bibliography of the published writings of Patrick Collinson, 1957–1992
- Index
Summary
Patrick Collinson concluded a recent tautly argued review of the historiography of the Protestant family by saying that ‘the doctrine and, so far as we can observe it in the field, the practice of early Protestantism in respect of marriage and domestic matters generally was not a total novelty, if novel at all’. In view of this it may appear consciously challenging to entitle a contribution to this book ‘The Protestant idea of marriage’. Yet his essay is full of sensitive comment on the questions that are left open after students of the conduct books have variously interpreted them on the one hand as embodying new values, even as giving shape to the family in its modern form, and on the other as repeating time-honoured or at least earlier advice. The Reformation, Collinson declares in a memorable phrase, ‘riveted home patriarchy’, but Protestantism, he also believes, ‘deepened the emotional quality of family life’. Within the conduct books he sees a discrepancy between ‘a stress on patriarchy amounting to a kind of benevolent despotism’ and attitudes towards wives and children ‘which encouraged affection and respect for their personal autonomy’. Others also have seen an historical problem here. Lawrence Stone saw one but closed it off with a schematic formulation of the development of the family which has not convinced many.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern BritainEssays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, pp. 161 - 181Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994
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