Prior to the Restoration, there were only two types of formal divorce in England: annulment, granted if there was a previously unacknowledged bar to a union, and separation a mensa et thoro (from table and bed), granted to allow spouses to live apart without dissolving their marriage bond. In Marriage, Separation, and Divorce in England, 1500–1700, K. J. Kesselring and Tim Stretton observe that the English did not introduce full divorce after the Reformation, unlike all other Protestant jurisdictions, and they suggest that this was due in part to the complicating effects of coverture, the common law doctrine by which married women lost their independent legal existence, becoming femes covert (covered women), subsumed within the personhood of their husbands. Though this suggestion is credible enough, the reader might have been offered more technical details about the distinctive legal problems that could have arisen due to coverture. Kesselring and Stretton admit that the assemblies of some English colonies later managed to grant full divorces regardless of the inherited law of coverture (168).

Kesselring and Stretton begin with an analysis of lawsuits related to marital separation brought before the Privy Council, Court of Chancery, and Court of Requests, most of which concern property or maintenance disputes between estranged couples. They also discuss private separations arranged without reference to courts of any kind, which appear as early as the sixteenth century. In chapter 2, they discuss another selection of lawsuits brought before the Court of Star Chamber. It may not be quite right to say that Star Chamber could void marriages (53). They discuss Dawes v. Sherman (1604), in which a marriage contract is said to have been “made voyde” in Star Chamber because the wife was under sixteen and there was no parental consent, in contravention of 4 & 5 Philip and Mary, c. 8. The Jacobean reporter's choice of vocabulary is telling, but contrast the later view of William Blackstone, who argued (in the same chapter that Kesselring and Stretton quote from on page 167) that this and other acts of parliament did not authorize secular courts to void offending marriages, but rather to declare marriage contracts void ab initio—a lawyerly distinction without a difference, perhaps, but it might have been worth discussing.

Kesselring and Stretton then turn their attention to public and private acts of Parliament pertaining to the subject of divorce, including the Bigamy Act of 1604, which made adulterous second marriage a felony punishable by death. The harshness of this act was softened by an ambiguous, perhaps deliberately ambiguous, proviso stipulating that the act did not apply to parties “divorced by any sentence had or hereafter to be had in the Ecclesiastical Court” (81). It was not clear whether this referred only to annulments or also to separations, and judges would struggle for decades with the ambiguity. In chapter 4, Kesselring and Stretton discuss the rise and fall of the southern High Commission as an alimony-granting jurisdiction (alimony was conceived of as a way of giving back to estranged wives some of the assets they had brought to a marriage). The commission came under attack from common lawyers for its arbitrary practices and was abolished in 1641. Kesselring and Stretton reprove early modern common lawyers for prioritizing proceduralism over women's welfare, but, then again, proceduralism can also serve as a safeguard for the freedoms of both men and women.

Chapter 5 is focused on the marriage litigation brought before both Houses of Parliament and before the Lords Commissioners for the Great Seal between 1640 and 1660. Parliament became a key venue for marriage litigation after the abolition of Star Chamber and the High Commission in 1641 and the cessation of Requests business in 1642. Later, as Kesselring and Stretton explain, Chancery became the body primarily responsible for deciding disputes over alimony. In the final chapter they discuss the introduction of full divorce with remarriage in cases of a wife's adultery. Such divorces, the first of which was granted in 1670, were allowed by private act of Parliament and operated according to a fiction that declared a living wife legally dead, thus debarring her from dower or jointure. Just over three hundred parliamentary divorces were granted between 1700 and 1847. In the afterword Kesselring and Stretton briefly discuss the first parliamentary divorce granted to a woman in 1801; the introduction of full, secular judicial divorce by the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857; the partial relaxing of the doctrine of coverture in the late nineteenth century; and developments to English divorce law in the twentieth century.

Although Kesselring and Stretton seem to sympathize with the elite wives in these disputes more so than with their husbands, speaking at one point of “patriarchal rage” (135), they generally explain the facts dispassionately. The book is based on a relatively limited range of sources, mainly English-language petitions and pleadings, but Kesselring and Stretton delve into these in sometimes illuminating ways. There is some repetition of material between chapter 2 of Marriage, Separation, and Divorce in England, 1500–1700 and chapter 6 of Star Chamber Matters: An Early Modern Court and Its Records (2021), which probably should have been declared. As with all books, there are a few minor errors of fact. For example, it is hard to see how the Court of Chancery can be called an “offshoot” of the Privy Council (27). Though Kesselring and Stretton say that “law reporting . . . was still fairly new in the 1580s” (44), it had been around for over three centuries by this point. The surviving series of the Journals of the Lords in Parliament begins in 1510, not 1509, according to Kesselring and Stretton's dating conventions (70). Quibbles aside, the book is a sound guide to the subject and, within the limits set, a success. The presentation is excellent, with very few typos.