Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
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Early Modern England Encyclopedia
By Kaitlin Zaugg and Kate McPherson, inspired by
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Love was not yet seen as the primary basis for marriage in the early modern period. Parents or guardians typically chose a partner for their child, thinking little of romantic love and deciding instead based on economics, alliances, and politics. This practice was shifting in the period, though, and children gradually became more empowered to veto a parent’s choice. People tended to marry within the same status, such as nobles marrying other nobles or artisans marrying within their own group of artisans.
Many people know that in Shakespeare’s play
Some argue that Shakespeare’s plays show an opposition to early marriage. In
High-ranking nobles sometimes employed an agent to find a match for their child. The agents proposed a match and offered reasons why their employer should choose specific candidates. The agents would also look at the power that an alliance with the candidate’s family brought. Go-betweens were also sometimes used when a nobleman found a match he was interested in to help either negotiate with the family or even to woo his potential bride if she was at a distance. Oftentimes, though, marriages were negotiated by family members, if not by the parents themselves.
Money was one of the major concerns for marriages during this period, with the amount of a dowry and also a jointure negotiated long before the wedding. A dowry, which was a sum of money paid to the groom’s family, allowed the bride’s family to ensure a stable financial future when she married into a new household. The dowry, sometimes called a
The jointure had a different use than the dowry. The main purpose of the jointure was as a safeguard; this sum of money was set aside to make sure that a widow would be taken care of and would be able to live somewhere in the event of her husband’s death.
Courtship was not typically about love, rather it was about gaining political advantage. For royalty, marriages were used to strengthen or repair alliances. For example, in Shakespeare’s
Historians identify the early modern period as a time when dynastic and economic reasons for marriage began to be supplanted by emotional and spiritual ones. Much of this shift was due to the Protestant Reformation and is surprisingly attributed to Puritans. Puritans saw companionate marriage, with consent and unity of purpose between the spouses, as the foundation upon which a strong society was built. Men still held strong patriarchal power in families, but they increasingly consulted their wives as partners rather than purely as superiors.
Among the upper ranks, property and family alliances remained important even as companionate marriage began to evolve. Connection between the spouses encouraged and valued, but romantic love seldom inspired or anchored marraiges among the elite, regardless of what the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries show. In reality, this meant that after children had been born to ensure that property could be passed to an heir, many noblemen separated from their wives and perhaps pursued other romantic interests. As many as one-third of older noblemen did this between 1595 and 1620. There is little or no data to indicate what inspired this choice or what the women in such separations thought.