Allen Horstman

Horstman traces the legal definitions and acceptable causes of divorce in England from Tudor to Victorian reigns. I was amazed to discover how expensive divorce was, and how many trials (three!) were initially required to get one. I was also suprised to find that divorce was not supposed to be a remedy to a bad marriage, but rather a punishment! No one was supposed to want a divorce--it was supposed to be forced upon you by overt adultery! That was another oddity: men had to prove adultery to get a divorce and women, when they were finally granted the ability, had to prove bigamous or incestuous adultery.

As fantastically intriguing as the history of divorce is, Horstman almost managed to ruin this book. He's a terrible writer. His paragraphs are made up of random sentences, few of which have anything to do with each other. One chapter had several pages copied word for word from a previous chapter!… (meer)