ABSTRACT
The historian John Boswell has compared marriage in pre-modern Europe with marriage in the modern West. In the earlier period, he argues, marriage conventionally began as a property arrangement, in its middle was chiefly about raising children, and ended about love. Western marriage, on the other hand, begins about love, in its middle is still largely about raising children, and often ends about property – ‘by which point love is absent or a distant memory’ (Boswell 1994: xxii).
