ABSTRACT
‘Widowers’ existed as a class of church servant, and, as part of the medieval church’s ambivalent response to remarriage, remarried men were subject to certain ecclesiastical restrictions. English proverbs, for example, although comparatively fertile on the subject of widows and remarriage, make very little reference to widowers. The clearest connotation of ‘widower’ would seem to be a kind of settled melancholy, but it is hard to be confident that the word had acquired even that much meaning before 1700. The strongest claim for the peculiarity of English patterns has been that of Macfarlane, whose stress on the longue durée of English individualism has involved ruling out the possibility of children taking in their ageing or widowed or infirm parents. ‘Widower’ was highly unusual among terms applied to men, in being derived from a term first applied to women. The canons of 1604 made it clear that those ‘being in widowhood’ could omit the obtaining of consents.
