Notes

Joanne Bailey and Loreen Giese reconsider the chronology of changing ideas about marital cruelty. They examine whether the mid-eighteenth century was in fact a turning point, after which English legal and lay attitudes to cruelty expanded from life-threatening violence to include a wide range of behaviours. They challenge the thesis of a ‘civilising’ process in attitudes towards state violence and inter-personal violence and draw on new conclusions about marital relationships, spouses’ gendered roles, and early modern manhood, which complicate specific views on patriarchal unions. In their discussion of cruelty cases from c. 1580 they argue that social toleration for a husband’s use of violence against their wives emerged much earlier than the mid-eighteenth century.